Life goes on!

It's amazing. Just when you reach that point where your mind and body tell you, "I can't go on," Life goes on. We have been through the greatest trials of our lives these past couple years, and what amazes me the most is the ordinariness of how it all levels out. I watched my son fight for his life, lost my grandmother, uprooted my family when we lost our house, consoled my husband from my hospital bed when he lost his job, battled PPD for the first time, tenaciously clung to our relationship that ended when our lives made us strangers, ... and in the midst of all this loss my eyes were opened to all I truly had. I did not have the crisis of faith that most people do. I did not see God in the butterflies, flowers, or sunshine, or have God Moments or Warm Fuzzies. I found my faith in realizing my heart will not literally break from agonizing sadness, I will find the strength to breathe when I've sobbed myself dry, I will find a way to pull together broken shards of strength and drag myself through another day when the very process of thinking overwhelms me. We survived, we pulled together, and we were not broken. That is my faith. If it is based on feelings and experiences, it is not faith, because then you can see and feel it. I have found a deeper, inner calm than I ever thought I had, and have come out of these last couple years an entirely different person. And I sit here now, basking in how ordinary my life is, and realizing what true contentment is. It's only when your world is rocked and you nearly lose it all that you can truly savor the ordinary. Watching my rambunctious boys get into mischief makes me smile, remembering the counseling sessions with the specialists on raising a blind, mentally disabled child. You get a different perspective on your son coloring on your sofa with markers when you are told he may never see color. Bringing my husband iced tea as he mows the lawn becomes a special privilege when you remember how he went months without mowing the lawn. Our yard became a jungle as he worked 12 hour shifts, ran home to put the kids to bed then visit me in the hospital. When I came home from the hospital, he was shell-shocked and emotionless, I was vulnerable and panicked, both mentally and emotionally spent from the ordeal, and we wondered if we would ever be able to love this stranger the other person had become. We had to start over, and we discovered that even in another life, this new life, we were meant to be together. Falling in love again is a miracle, and I appreciate it more this time around. The odds were against us, against all of this, but here we are. I've never been so happy in all my life to be so ordinary, so thankful that life truly does go on.