ForeverLOVEd

Survive: continue to live or exist, especially in spite of danger or hardship.   In the middle of an otherwise mundane afternoon of work, their anxious joy jarred me away from my computer.  The mother beamed with a smile and looked to her husband to share this overwhelming good news. I waited eagerly to see how I might be able to help them. I could make out most of the words as they spoke to me while gazing back at each other to confirm that their words made sense.  It was probably obvious I do not speak a Spanish. They stretched beyond their own comfortability to tell me this great news. Their daughter had made First Communion in 2011 and they finally decided it was time to part with her dress.  They came to my office to donate it, in hopes that some other girl may feel the pure excitement and love their daughter did the day she wore it.  The mom lovingly pointed out every detail of the dress as she handed it to me to pass on. She then sent her husband bac...

Persevere:  to  persist  in a state, enterprise, or undertaking in spite of counterinfluences, opposition, or discouragement Walks with my dog are usually squished in between this and that.  Whether the day is rushed or not, I have a constant clock ticking. It’s a clock that says move faster, go quicker, beat the time you had before. I constantly race against myself to get the things I feel I have to do done more efficiently than before.  It’s a fault.  One I cannot seem to break. When the steps were flying and the dog was racing to keep up with my hurry, an older couple staled us. They looked mature in years, but so young in love.  He wore baggy jogging pants and her wrinkled hand grabbed on tightly to his arm. And they walked quite literally as slow as snails. At first I thought to myself, how inconvenient, right in the middle of my gold medal walking performance, a road block basically stopped me in my tracks. But then, I became captivated at th...

Reliant: dependent on someone or something.  There's a couple who comes into church everyday. She holds his hand and he stands tall.  She nudges him when he should be standing up or sitting down. The years they have spent together are written in the space between them. This couple shows me reliance. The man cannot see. The wife guides him along the way. There are moments though, when she forgets to nudge him. Maybe she is caught up in the words God is speaking to her or the list of things she has to do today. Does God reach the man any less if he does not sit or stand when he should? Does the man only hear or feel God when the person he is relying on shows up or comes through?  I want to be more like the man who is gentle with her on the days she guides him, and the days she is too distracted to. Because I believe God comes through for the man on both days. I want to be more like the man who relies on God first and her second. 

Irresistible: too powerful or convincing to be resisted. Every New Years Eve, we pick a word to define the months ahead.  Maybe it's an ambitious word, or a refreshing one. Sometimes it's a word that we hope for more of in the year to come, other times it's what we feel we finally discovered in the year gone by. Whatever it is, whether we have picked it long before the clock strikes midnight, or it's just something we fancy in the moment as we pop the champagne, we write the word on the mirror in the entry way and hope that it becomes our mantra for the next 365 days.  As 2016 came to an end, and 2017 popped on the scene with its gusto, and guts, grace, and gruel, the word I could not shake was irresistible. And maybe if you were in the new year, new you state of mind, you could consider that a resolution of sorts. To create a me that's irresistible could have been my goal for the year. But that's not why the word hung around.  As 2016 came to a close and 20...

Why you with your long brown hair flowing And you with your fresh tattooed skin And you from the Western Virginia That you'll never get to see again As darkness descended the desert And a bad actor starred in his play Why you from Tennessee did life capture And me from Tennessee get away -Eric Church  I had just fallen into that moment, the one between sleep and awake. My head rested heavily on my cool pillow, the ceiling fan swayed in constant motion above me, and a dreamlike sensation mixed with heavy eyes had me off to Neverland. And then, like the cold that filled that eery night, my slumber was erupted with that tiny vibrating of my phone. And in that moment, the world I knew, changed.  I never left my phone on when I slept. I have no idea why or how that night it had been. And twenty minutes later when I sat frozen in my bed, still in shock, and utterly terrified, my mom wondered what I was doing. I replied, "Mom, I'm so scared."  I was paralyzed i...

"Christ does not force our will, He only takes what we give Him. But He does not give Himself entirely until He sees that we yield ourselves entirely to Him." St. Therese of Avila  Well, it's happening. I think these three words to myself multiple times a day. I shake my head in awe, smile slightly, and wonder to myself how, as I make my way through the rush hour traffic running from one place to another. But here it is and here it is working.  This fall has been the most insane, overwhelming, and beautiful journey.  In pursuit of my teaching credential, I am student teaching full time. This is a job I knew I could handle alongside my full time job, when my job was what it had been for three years.  What none of us knew was that our office would be taking on twice as much work, creating a whole new program for a whole new population, and be down a coworker due to a fluke injury. Most days I leave my house at seven in the morning and return around nine in the eve...

Tomorrow will be the first month of my life that I'll start without him. September will come, and Papa won't be here. I won't get to call him and tell him about the new year starting at work, how cute my little kiddos are or what cool class I'm enrolled in for the semester. I won't get to chat with him about the Kansas heat, or his morning mass coffee crew. I won't open a birthday card signed with his sweet message or hear about his travel plans for spring. He will never get to meet the man of my dreams and hug me tight on my wedding day. I'll never get to hear him tell his favorite stories from our adventure together in Europe, or hear his recollection of my favorite songs to sing when I was a kid. September is here and I'm sad because I miss him.  In June, Papa told us his time with us was short. He had been diagnosed with a devastating cancer that was not going to go away. The doctor gave him 1 to 4 months to live. My eyes unleashed tears like a flo...