New Life

Everywhere I look lately are the signs of new life.....
....spring arrives officially in four days.

Flowers are appearing everywhere.  Many are my favorites.

Trees are awakening with buds and the most intricate blooms which just take my breath away when I look through the camera lens.

How could anything so tiny and full of detail be so delicate, graceful, and complex?

.....only the Lord could create such beauty.

"Don't forget about new life....." are words I hear.  I'm thinking about those words a lot lately.   There is new life all around me, but there is new life to come too in heaven.

My daddy has pneumonia.  It is a hard time for him right now, because Alzheimer's is a huge road block to his healing.  Yes, I'm thinking a lot about new life this week.  Sometimes I wonder if I should look at his disease a different way these days.  Instead of Alzheimer's winning as it continues to steal him away, maybe I should have a different perspective.... "heaven is winning...." and in the end whenever that may be, Daddy is walking closer to heaven every day.  He IS winning in the eyes of eternity because God is renewing the imperishable every day as the perishable continues to fade before him.  We are all walking toward eternal life either with or without our Lord.   Life continues day by day for us until we breathe our last breath here and step over the threshold from this life we know to the  next.  My daddy will be greeted on the other side of the horizon with "Welcome!"  I can just hear it now, "You're here!!!  I'm so happy!  Well done my good and faithful servant."

This hope does not take away my sadness watching my dad suffer from his illness and now added illness on top of what he daily battles.  It does not make his journey of Alzheimer's any easier or stop the continual losing of his mind.  It doesn't take his pneumonia or many other health challenges away,  but it HELPS me COPE better with life's situations that are not easy and COMPLETELY out of my control.

New life....

So thankful for new life all around me.....

If the Lord God cares so much about what He created in nature all around us, why would he not care even more for us?

The answer is.....
....He does.

Jesus told us not to worry.
"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?..... "Matthew 6:26

He loves us more than the birds, budding trees, and blooming flowers in all of their splendor.   He gave up His very life for us so we could have that new life He promises for all eternity.   John 3:16  just means even more when I look through my camera lens at my Bradford pear blossoms and the trees blooming in the special places I love and appreciate close to my home and my heart.

I remember the hope we have in Christ.
Easter is coming!
May Easter's hope bring a renewed joy to our lives!

Your Love Never Fails

Romans 8:38-39

"For I am convinced that neither life nor death,
neither angels nor demons,
nor the present nor the future,
nor any powers, nor height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God, that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

(Photos by Judith Crovi)

I went to see my dad this afternoon.  Tom and I like to go see Dad on Sundays.  I picked some hyacinths and daffodils for Dad from my front yard to replace the last bunch I'd brought him a week ago.  I wanted to leave a hyacinth with my mom above her niche.  I had placed a daffodil there last weekend during special family time, when my aunts were at the columbarium.  I had brought a hyacinth then too, but lost it out of my purse some where between the sanctuary of the church and the columbarium.  So impulsively I decided to just stop by the columbarium on the way to dad's.  I decided once the car was parked at the church that I'd take more than one flower to the niche.
....two hyacinths one from me, one from Tom and a daffodil from Dad....one different from the one last week.

When I walked into the garden I started taking photos.  I didn't even walk right up the wall of the chapel right away.  I was looking at the tree buds....

And the angel fountain...

What I didn't expect was waiting for me..... I knew this day would come.  We'd been waiting for 7 and a half months.  The engraving of Mom's name on her and Dad's niche.

There is was, etched in stone.

I clasped my hand over my mouth and started to sob.

It was so beautifully done.

Yet to stand there and look at your parent's birth and death dates carved in stone, somehow feels surreal.  How can this be?  I feel like I just was with her.  I feel like I was just laughing with her and my sons.  We were playing UNO or scrabble or going over to see Dad and having some family time. Is she really gone?  It's been almost 8 months, yes of course she is not here.  I have accepted that.

Yet, today it felt real, like a piece of the very stone I was staring at had hit me all of a sudden.

Those letters etched in stone...

seem so incredibly more final than anything else these past eight months.

My mom is not here.  Yet the ashes of those loving arms and hands which literally brought me home from the adoption agency, have held me, hugged me, changed my diapers as a baby, drove me to school, signed my report cards, wrote in my birthday cards, made meals for our family, sewed and made so many of my clothes as a child, rocked my grandsons, and held their hands, loved my dad and served and honored him for almost 60 years and just made everything so beautiful are behind that stone rectangle.

I hear those words "Don't weep for me..... I'm not here."

Yet I still weep....

I miss my Mom.

She is not here.
Yet all I need do is look up....and the Lord meets me in this fresh grief once more.  Those letters carved in stone also mean something else....  she is with the one and true Lord who comforts all of us in our times of grief and mourning.

Mom is with her Lord and Savior.

Pastor Jeff gave us Scripture today at church related to death and eternal life.
"I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand."
John 10:28-29

Mom's future is secure.

Isaiah 49:15-16 says, "See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;...."

Mom is forever the Lord's and He her treasure.

This of course brings me great hope and I long for heaven more than I ever have in my life.  Once you lose some one so very close whom you know loved the Lord and lived a life of faith,  you feel like heaven is just not that far away from you.  It's closer than any of us could ever imagine.

I can't lose sight of the prize that is to come!

Mom would not want any of us to do that.

She would also want us to keep smiling and living for Him!  Life is too short here on this present earth to not share the love of Christ which He pours into us, with other people.

"Be happy!", she would say.
"Live your life!  Use your gifts!  Thank your Lord for it all!"

I think she would be ok with my weeping too though.

I know she would weep for Dad, for Tom, for her sisters and niece, for her grandsons, for Mike and myself.

This song was played on the radio, FOUR times on various radio stations for that matter, while I was driving to and from Dad's this afternoon.  Let's just say I can't get the song out of my head now.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God....

It is based on Romans 8:38-39, which I have at the top of this post.

"His love never fails, it never runs out, it never runs out on me..... " as the song goes.  It doesn't run out on any of us.
And it certainly did not run out for Mom when she died.  God's love goes on and on and on....

Seeing her name etched in stone is hard.  Yet I just look at the flowers above her name and I remember and I weep and I know she lives on..... and will see her again.