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Hold on Tightly... and Loosely

So many things have been swirling through my mind I hardly know what to write about.  My time alone is so limited that I think of more things to blog than I am able to get down.  Then I seem to forget them.  They slip away in the fog of mommy brain!  One of my girls was screaming her head off in a public restroom yesterday while I tried to change her out of her poopy (I mean covered in poop!) clothes, and a lady walked by and said "All I can say is thank God!"  Meaning she was glad she didn't have a squirmy, screaming, covered in poop child.  I just looked at her, smiled, and said, "That's what I say, too.  Thank God!  I say that every time I look at her."  And I laid a big kiss on my stinky, precious, red faced one!

Squeeze them tighter.  Kiss them more.  Laugh when they spill it all over your clean floor.  Yes, you should.  You absolutely should.  Don't waste another second with them.  If this tragedy has done anything for me, it is to make me appreciate every wonderful, messy part of being a parent.  On the rare occasion that both of my gifts are joining together in a chorus of screaming, I get out the video camera.  And I laugh.  Because this too shall pass- all too quickly.

I was thinking while I brushed my teeth this morning that before the accident, for about a year I had a sense of "hold on loosely" in my heart sometimes when I would pray.  I thought this was in reference to material things.  But I think now that it was to help prepare me- as if anything could- for a parting that I could not have dreamed.  Since I have been on an irony theme, here is another one.  We must hold loosely, and yet tightly, to anything in this world.  Our home, if our faith is in Jesus, is ultimately heaven.  So somehow, in a mystery of loving, we are to cling to our dear ones every moment that we have but hold them loosely as we offer all in surrender to the King.  He is the only thing we can never be separated from... unless we choose it.

I learned a verse shortly before Makiah died, and it has come back to me many times.  It is part of a psalm of David.  "Whom have I in heaven but you?  And earth has nothing I desire besides you."  I was praying that it would be true for me.  Not that I would not value anyone or anything here, but that in comparison to my love for God all else would pale.   It is not true of me right now.  But the verse won't leave me alone.  How to get there?  To a place of really loving God above all else?  Even through the separation of your dreams and the crunching of your heart?  Is it possible?  Maybe you can tell me,  if you have walked this broken road...

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