Anniversary

Today is an anniversary. It is not the kind you celebrate, the numbers stacking up to year upon year of life or love. It is the sad kind. An anniversary that counts lasts and loss and deep missing. This kind of anniversary is the kind you dread. Ugh. It's April 14th again. April 14th. The weeks before, I find myself dwelling...thinking about the lasts. The last dinner, the last Christmas, the last laugh, the last hug, the last picture of all 5 siblings.... I think long about 26 years with my brother and search hard for lost memories that give me a little more to hold onto and remember.

Minds can move fast to dark places. The "why" question pops up too often and without answer. Visions of his last moments haunting. Self pity and bitterness at the awful fall-out that has ballooned a tragedy much bigger than it had to be and that continues now, four years later. I quietly long for healing from all this. Real healing.

I pray.

Lord, teach me more. Help me to find "the gifts". 

I think I have changed a lot the last 4 years. Maybe it is only visible to me. A lot of it is just a different way of looking at life, and family, and priorities, and sin, and God's love. I fear more pain because I'm human, but I know I can breathe through it with the One who provides my very breath. His grace is sufficient for me.

2Corinthians 12:8-10
8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.