Part of walking the road of grief is finding ways to associate new life with what has been lost. I think my kids are best at this concept.
Not long ago while driving somewhere, Nate said, "Mom, I've figured something out. You know when there are clouds and then you see a hole in the cloud and you can see right through to blue? Well, that's a hole to heaven. Jesus is letting us see heaven and he is letting Papa see us.
I find that kids have an insight that adults often lack. That hole in the cloud is a gift to my sweet 7 year old who misses his hero.
Josh is much more vocal about sharing about his Papa. Not long ago, we had some amazing rainbows after a storm. We were standing out on the deck admiring God's masterpiece; a reminder of His promise when Josh said, "Mom, rainbows are a gift from Papa so we know he is thinking about us."
He has said this about any rainbow he has seen since my dad passed away - sometimes they are small and sometimes they are huge, like this one. We find that we get much more excited when we see this "gift in the sky" than we used to.
As with any funeral, we received so many beautiful plants and flower arrangements and they were truly appreciated. I picked out a few to bring home and one of them came in this brass pot seen below. By about February of this year, the plant died and I set the planter outside thinking that maybe I could replant something in it in the spring. As spring arrived, I noticed what I thought was a weed growing out of the dirt. A few weeks later I realized that it wasn't a weed, it was a gift . .one of my favorite flowers was growing from a pot that had been frozen solid that had never contained this plant - a Sunflower. The kids and I all see it as a gift - a gift of the wonderful reminder that life is beautiful even after dark days.
