Tuesday July 28

Started with the kids Saturday after Elizabeth's last swim meet
Then Courey took them home Sunday night and I picked them back up Monday after my Stephen Ministry...minus one...the baby is at home to be potty trained...at 2!?!?

It is amazing to me that I do not remember that process...even having repeated it with 4 children...how do you potty train?!?! what was the trick?!?! how did it happen?!?

I wonder if it's something that made it to the journals that I could do a little memory research on?!?! but I doubt it!?!? potty training methods lost forever in my failed and flawed memory...

I am glad I have those journals though...and someday I will re-read them and cherish the memories. I haven't yet...I read snippets here and there, but I have't gone thru them...

They aren't exactly what I think they are...I may have written often...but it wasn't so much to capture an occurance or event as it was to capture my thought about what was going on...and alot of the thought, like writing here, is randomn and unrelated to what is actualy going on in real life?!?

I am glad I have them though otherwise I know my recollection of those times would be gone...
and those were such important times, those baby years, those early married, figuring out life years.......

And now why do I write?!?!
...these still figuring out years...
maybe that's all life is

I liked my TEC talk...it was about "life" and my experiences of God's presence in my life.
It ultimately was about Eucharist...sacred presence...gratitude

I juxtaposed life with death, the death I experience in my hospice ministry, the death of Jeannette, who first moved me into hospice work, and Christ's death...
How standing next to death really makes you look at life differently; as a gift
and how sacred it is, precious
and yet how mundane and routine it really is, most of us do not have jet setting, exciting lives...
we have life...regular ordinary
'abundant' life

and we have eternity

and in Eucharist all those things collide...God became man...entered into our dirty, sweaty, hot, painful, sinful, fallen world...and did it consciously
He knew exactly what He was getting into...and still came

I probably wouldn't have done it...left the glory of 'heaven'...perfection, a place we can not even 'imagine'
I have difficulty leaving the comfort of my own home and life and just going to visit someone experiencing pain and sickness who might be a little unwashed, and half dressed...
Would I actually go there if I knew I would experience that same sickness?!?

Some people do...

and Jesus did...

Just one of the ways I know He lives in me...I know I would never do such things on my own volition?!?!

And the thought of Him actually living in me...blesses and blows me away...daily
I wake up; I AM ALIVE
I am part of God's creation today...this day...that is only for now, it will never come again, and it has never been before...
what a gift
how grateful I am
and not only am I alive again today, I am alert and thinking, I am able to move, to pull the covers up over my head if I want and try to sleep a little longer
or I can get up
get to the bathroom by myself
without using a buzzer to get assistance
or the aid of a walker to help me move one foot in front of the other
I get up and go...

I wash my hands in service to my God in His day
I look in the mirror at my face
that is aging and wrinkling and I try to imagine Him living in me
somewhere in me, my heart, my spirit...my very life

And I am awestruck
and I haven't even moved twenty steps from my bed...
and yet I have soooooooooooo much
a safe clean bed
a husband in that bed
a husband who loves me
who knows me
who stays with me.......

whose given me this home
these children

this life

I know he may not always be here
I may someday have to walk alone, as I have seen others have to do

I am grateful
I give thanks

And that is what Eucharist is

Thanksgiving
God's gift of perfect sacrifice; Jesus
who took away our sin and death...so we might have eternity...life everlasting

And in that death juxtaposed with life we come to appreciate all the blessings we have been given

We have life, we have each other and we are all one, pretty much the same, yet each precious, sacred...holy

Non better than the other...each needing...and each able to give and share and be something to an other

to be a spouse, a parent, a provider, a care-giver....
to love one another

It's no big hardship, not an impossibility......

love the one you're with
love who God puts in your life
love what God puts before you...

We can do no great things, just small things with great love...Mother Theresa