Grief is very personal.
I would love there to be a recipe for grief to follow or a ‘how-to’ book.
But nope.
No recipe.
No book.
Just living each moment.
Feeling the emotions.
My dad is choosing to cross country ski through this month of grief.
January has thirty-one days.
He has skied twenty-seven days.
Each day.
Getting up.
Getting out.
And skiing.
For a total of ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY- TWO kilometres this month.
One kilometre at a time.
Grief is very personal.
I would love there to be a recipe for grief to follow or a ‘how-to’ book.
But nope.
No recipe.
No book.
Just living each moment.
Feeling the emotions.
My dad is choosing to cross country ski through this month of grief.
January has thirty-one days.
He has skied twenty-seven days.
Each day.
Getting up.
Getting out.
And skiing.
For a total of ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY- TWO kilometres this month.
One kilometre at a time.
Every day.
Making a choice.
To ski through his grief.
I love you dad!
As I watched my littlest one fly through the air on the chairlift, I thought of air, the importance of breathe and God’s Holy Spirit.
This is how my mind works these days, simple moments become incredible moments.
I can be sitting watching my boys play with Lego and I feel love and warmth pour over me like a dousing of water over my head.
I may be listening to a woman speak about her health struggles and I want to bawl my eyes out with sadness.
Often, I see women with their moms and I want to lie flat on the ground, humbled by what I have lost and amazed at how present my mom was in our lives.
Today, I come back to air.
To my breathe.
To God’s Holy Spirit.
I will seek with my whole heart the significance of breathe.
And I will breathe.
Deeply.
Full of gratitude.
I love this journey.
Life.
Alive.
Air.
Breathe.
Breath.
Life-giving Holy Spirit.
A three year old.
His Dadda.
On a chair soaring through the air.
Pure joy.
Great delight.
Even at this height.
No fear.
Only peace.
His Dadda is near.
May we see our Father God this week with His arms around us as we walk, run, ski, ride or meander through the air.
What do you personally think every human being should know or be able to do?
For Sexy Neck and I, we believe it is essential that our boys learn how to move their bodies safely.
Thus, gymnastics is a priority for our schedule and our budget.
Man, it isn’t cheap!
As we move into our winter activities, we say goodbye to our autumn gymnastics class.
Thank you for teaching our boys to balance, hop and roll.
I wonder if we made gymnastics mandatory for us all, what would our Western-living lives look like?
How do you explain something with words that is just a feeling?
What do you say to describe a place where only you may be at?
I have been searching for weeks to describe this sense of where I am as I begin 2015.
Suddenly, as I read another woman’s story, it hit me:
“Threshold.”
A word to describe where I am at.
The best one that I can conjure up.
I am neither living in my past, nor do I feel that I am moving anywhere in the forward direction.
Sitting.
Holding still.
On a threshold.
For those that know me well, they know that holding still is not my forte.
Give me a list.
Tell me what needs to be “done”.
Ask me to organize.
I am your woman!
But not now.
Maybe not again.
My head is still fuzzy.
The grief I feel is deep and raw.
The hole my mom has left in my life is vast.
So I sit, peacefully in my home.
Happy on the ski hill.
Surrounded by love.
Glancing back.
Looking forward.
Just being.
On the threshold.
New year.
New eyes.
An old dresser.
Dressed up to now hold Lego.
We have copious amounts of Lego.
Sexy Neck took an old family dresser.
Painted it with old white molding paint.
Added some leftover chalkboard paint, with the boys help.
Glued on the Lego bases that the boys got for Christmas.
Viola!
A new thing.
To help us keep things organized in the new year!
I am extremely grateful.
Great work boys.
More snow than in over seventy years.
First ‘snow’ day school closures in over forty years.
Days of snow falling.
Big thick snowy flakes pouring from the sky.
Great memories with friends and the three brothers playing together.
Hours upon hours of creativity and outside snow time.
It has been a monumental Epiphany.
Nope, no epiphany for me today.
Another kind of Epiphany.
We are celebrating the twelfth day after Christmas that symbolizes the three wise men arriving from the East to worship the newborn King, Jesus.
Here’s the boys Epiphany play:
The wise men have spent the last weeks traveling from a faraway box land arriving in our bookshelf stable in Bethlehem.
We created three ice candles and placed them in our front yard, which is coincidently (or not) to the East of our home. We didn’t realize this was the East until JC pointed it out.
Sexy Neck read about the three Wise Men and we eventually talked about how we both came to know God personally in a private manner.
My beginnings with God began, coincidently, with a writing journal in my bedroom and for Sexy Neck, he came to know God through snow. Another coincidence? Hmmmm….
It was a privilege to celebrate Epiphany today and it is an even larger privilege to know a personal God where snow is the gift of “Epiphany”.
"Be" ENOUGH 