Saturday, 24 2009

Well, my friends, it's been a while... not that i need to apologize for not keeping up to date, as i am sure you all just can't wait for that time that i am sure you all have set aside to read my blog....haha! I really have no good excuses, other than i just haven't felt up to posting lately. These past couple of weeks have been full of ups and downs; laughs and cries; hope and disappointment; sweetness and bitterness; peace and confusion; numbness and full of emotion; togetherness yet loneliness; lost and found; sad but happy. It's funny how you can feel so many emotions over one incident. I guess we are allowed to so that we can learn from how we feel. My heart has been very full and aching. My sweet grandma, Marian Hofheins passed away to reunite with family and friends and to be in the presence of our Father in Heaven and elder brother, Jesus Christ last Friday, the 17th. I don't believe I have ever been so close to death, as I wondered each time I left grandma's room if it would be the last I would see her. It was one of the hardest things I have ever been around, and yet I wouldn't trade those precious last conversations and sweet moments with grandma for anything. I still feel like I need to be woken up from a sad dream.... someone want to pinch me?

So, I have been doing alot of thinking lately- specifically about life. It is interesting to note that many people are in the same state of living when life begins as we are when it is ending- the state of being vulnerable.
Vulnerable because you can't control the chaos happening all around you-
Vulnerable in the fact that we often don't have control of our actions or movements-
Vulnerable because the possibility to do most things on our own does not exist....
Controlling our bodily functions; the inability to run away from circumstances we'd rather not be in; even more constricting, the gift of speaking- not being able to tell the people who are taking care of you that they are not being nice, or that they may just be idiots; that you'd rather not be bounced this way or talked to that way; that the dry, crusted cereal from two meals ago feels really weird sticking to your face and you'd like it wiped; that rather being 'gooed' at in silly, loud, or slow paced voices, you just want to be held and be close to them instead; not being able to convey that having a body is a tuff thing to be in charge of, maybe not all that is was 'cracked up to be'; or, simply, not knowing how to say "I'm tired. I just want to go to sleep", in some situations, forever.
Another interesting thing about life is that fairness does not matter so much when coming into the world and leaving this world because of the vulnerable state we are in, in both states. But, what about the middle part of life then? Being past coming into the world, but not quite to the whole death part? One thing for sure is that life is not always fair. Why is that? Well, the constant element of change- death, jobs, parents, children, living situations, friendships-
It is in this middle part we get to choose how we deal and respond to fairness, or the lack thereof. Whether we create a constant rain cloud over our heads and wonder around aimlessly, searching for just one thing that might create an umbrella to protect us from the harshness of the storms that never seem to stop. Or do we decide to wake up each morning, knowing the sun will indeed rise, and find hope in something as simple as that? Finding hope that because the sun does rise (rain, clouds, or even the simple peace of a blue sky) is evidence that there is a God that provides light for all of His children. That, because the sun rises each day, it means new life; it means we have another chance to do something incredible, productive, or useless. It is this middle part of life that gives us the opportunity to mold who we are and what we stand for. We learn how to protect ourselves; how to hide our insecurities; how to magnify our talents. We learn that it is okay to have rainy days here and there, but we'd much rather have the sunny ones. We learn that life is precious- that it's not just something to be wasted because we never know when it will be taken from us.
So, no, we may not always have control of how and why we enter and leave this world, but we do have control of how we live.
So, tomorrow, I will wake up whether rain, sadness, joy, relief or confusion is present, and I will roll out of bed knowing the sun is rising and i have yet another chance to make someone proud; kiss a skinned knee; to learn something new; to exercise my patience, love, understanding, agency, and compassion; or, to just simply sit back and be grateful that I am still in the 'middle part' of this thing we call life.