Just Keep Walking....

 My Prayer From November 17, 2018

I sit here this Saturday morning....the sun is blazing through the windows, the leaves on the trees hanging on for dear life and the house is quiet....no wheelchair running into the doors...no squeaky rubber wheels turning on the wood floors...

 

I see a tiny hand print on the back french door...must be Roy or Sam or Ruthie's....and I'm tempted to get up from this perch I'm sitting on and go take a picture of it. 

We are one week past the Memorial Service for Chuck.  I was dreading this day last Saturday....but God turned it into something beautiful and right.  I've lost count of the many people who said it was the best service they have ever been to.  Who laughed at the many shenanigans of Chuck and learned about a man they most likely never knew.  

 

But now they do. 

 

We honored him the way he would have wanted to be honored.  This I'm sure of.  God blessed me with 24 years of walking together, laughing and playing tricks on people.  He tried to teach me not to take life too seriously....take this road with a little lighter step and, by-golly, just keep walking.  

 

Even...no especially...when life throws crap at you.  

 

God is helping me do just that.  To finally learn what he was trying to teach me all along.  That no house....no circumstance....no disease can take me down unless I "allow" it to.  We are here only for such a short time....a very short time in relational to eternity...so LIVE...and LIVE it right.  

 

Smile.  Love.  Help.  Teach.....

 

...and be a mirror to others of what is located deep inside of us...and that is God.  May I open myself up fully for others to see Him in me and say, "I want what she has" just as I did years ago when I witnessed the life my brother James lived.

So I thank God today.  Thank Him for getting me through these past few weeks.  The final weeks of Chuck's life were brutal.  And yet, they were just weeks.  They weren't months or years...they were weeks.  And I thank Him for taking him before they turned into months and years.  

 

That's called Amazing Grace.

And so here I sit...alone...but not...in this beautiful house so much has happened in.  Flood Waters, Death, Joy, Marriages, Births...I think back on all the things that have happened here and I'm blown away at how much life this house actually held.  Not just the words  scratched with a Markie on the beams and floors of this beautiful home after the Flood; promises God made to us so long ago covering and surrounding this blessed and, in some ways, HOLY place... but the Love from the hands of friends and family that wrote His words throughout this home. 

I thank Him for discouraging home buyers to keep looking elsewhere.  They weren't meant to live here....and in some small corner of my soul, I think I always knew that.  I never know His reasons or ways, but I felt them in this situation.  So I'm relieved I'm not moving......and I know I will feel the attempt at Fear to discourage, scare and cause me to cry again some day because in many ways, I long to move.  This is a guarantee.  But may I always remember ....God is the Man of this House...He is the Leader of this home and this life I live in.  I thank Him for being the Leader of Liz.

Today I take in a deep breath of this new day I have been allowed to be a part of.  For none of us know the number of our days...we are simply striving for the last page of the earthly travel book with our name on it.  He "owns" my heart...because part of it is actually His."