Grammy
Since Jul 12, 2000
|
|
Grammy
Since Jul 12, 2000
| |||||
|
| ||||||
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft star that shines at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there; I did not die.
Christopher A H. 10/20/98~7/7/14
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Merry Christmas friends. Most of you know how rarely I post.... and most of you know the tragic turn our lives took this July. However, there is now another chapter to the story. I thought you would like to know that even in the midst of utter devastation God does hear, and answer, prayers.
7/7/14. The day my life stopped. As you probably realize, I quit breathing on the day Chris died. Not only was it a shock and great grief to lose him, but it also felt like a betrayal by God, since Chris died while I was praying. My feeling was "Hey, can't You watch my back while I'm talking to YOU?"
I feel my kids. I feel where they are and how they are doing. When I started walking up to the office to see if Chris was there I was fine. Half way to the office, my heart was ripped out..... I knew he was gone. I KNEW it. I just looked off into the woods and prayed... Jesus, just let me find him.... don't make me hunt for him like we had to with JT. I ran to the office and found him. He was gone. He was gone gone! He had been gone for hours. He was so long gone that I didn't even pray for him..... there was a huge hole where I used to feel him. A vacuum.
One morning several days later I woke up groggy. I don't usually wake up groggy, but on this day I did, and as I stumbled around my room, I realized I couldn't find Chris in my spirit. I panicked as I started looking for him in my head..... he wasn't at Sarah's, and he wasn't at Gunners.... and ... and .... oh, he's at the funeral home..... he's gone. So I held my breath, and just under the surface felt that panic of not being able to find him lock into my spirit.
At the service the pastor who knew Chris told stories of what he was now doing in heaven. My friends and family talked of him in heaven. I didn't. I couldn't feel him there. I had been with both of my parents when they left, and was able to pray for them and talk to them and tell them it was ok to go with Jesus. I didn't get to do that with Chris. And as a teen, I hadn't really had a serious conversation with him to know if his knowledge of Jesus was head knowledge or heart knowledge. Yes we had talked about JT and where he was..... that God was merciful and JT knew Jesus. We didn't talk about whether Chris really knew Jesus though. There was time for that.... so we thought.
Finally, on Sept. 12...... after 9 weeks of torment, I decided to talk to God again. I told Him perhaps I could start to trust Him again, if I knew..... KNEW.... that Chris was with Him and he was OK. I thought about all the flowers at his funeral, and realized that almost every bouquet had sunflowers in them. I also realized that I had never been given sunflowers before. So I asked God to give me a sunflower so I would *know* Chris was with Him. I didn't care if it was a picture, a real one, a fake one or soap scribbled on my windows. Just a sunflower.
I didn't tell anyone. I just started looking for sunflowers. They are everywhere!!!! And not a one was coming to me! I watched people in line ahead of me at the store with big bouquets of them.... sometimes several bouquets! Nope, they didn't hand me one. They didn't drop one in the parking lot for me to pick up. No bird picked a wild one and dropped it on my deck. My friend made a wreath for me. I stopped at her house to pick it up and she had a wreath on her front door with a dozen sunflowers! Not a single one on my wreath. When Gary and I would go to the store, I would walk away from the flowers. I knew that Gary, being the nice man he is, would see me looking at them and say "lets get you flowers!" I didn't want to gin this up on my own..... I wanted an answer to prayer. I checked out the flowers on the paper towels. I even started looking at stamps on the mail and opening junk mail to make sure I wouldn't miss one.
Nothing.
In the meantime I was pounding on God's door, asking for an answer. Constantly. Finally, after almost a month, I decided either Chris wasn't with Him, or He wasn't going to answer my prayer. I didn't give up hope totally, but I began to resign myself to not knowing which, for perhaps the rest of my life. I knew I would continue pounding on the door, but I might never know. And I knew that every day I would wake up full of hope that today was the day.... and every day without an answer would end with great disappointment and sadness for me.
Wednesday, Oct 8. We were expecting company for dinner. I was at the sink washing dishes, Gary was arriving from a meeting. He walked in the door behind my back and I began talking to him. When I turned around, I saw an armful of sunflowers! I burst into tears. He was confused..... shocked and dismayed! He's not used to me sobbing when he brings me flowers. He almost backed right out of the door. I finally managed to get out the explanation of my prayer. He said he just felt like he needed to stop and get me flowers on the way home. He looked over all the varieties (he normally brings roses) and chose the sunflowers. He also brought me an orchid.... but that tended to get lost in the picture. He said he guessed he needed to bring me a bouquet for the prayer, and another for me.
Sunflowers are now my favorite flower. I remember looking at a field of sunflowers with Chris and telling him that their faces follow the sun. His face must now be following the Son as well.
So, I still miss the socks off of Chris, but at least I know where he is. I know I can tell Jesus I am missing him and would he please give Chris a hug. I am breathing a bit more, and no longer panicked. I can almost hear Chris' laughter ringing in heaven. But mostly I am grateful that God chose to answer this prayer so I may start to walk forward.
Merry Christmas son. We miss you incredibly, and love you forever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Sowell @ThomasSowell · 12h Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Steyn knows exactly who these "folks" are, and like Guiliani, he isn't afraid to say it:
Ask anyone who has lived under communism or has seen the damage that results, and most of them will ask how an American could vote for and elect Obama who is doing exactly what the communists were doing for decades. Mark Steyn explains perfectly what Obama and his leftist administration are doing.
From the article:.
"I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies: In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
"When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
"We are at war with a depraved enemy, but we cannot be allowed to assert our moral superiority even to head-choppers, rapists, slavers and immolators. - Thus the priority of Barack ("Hey, how 'bout those Crusades?") Obama has been to undermine our sense of probity, - and make us not merely equivalent to but worse than our enemies. - That was the purpose of this last week of Official Lies."
------------------------------------------------------------
" Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." CS Lewis
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Read the whole thing, as they say. Of course atheists feel pangs of emotion. They grieve, they laugh, they cry, they show up to hug and console. But when it comes to having something substantive to say, something that would provide consolation that life has meaning; that one doesnt simply occupy space for a time and then decompose; that there are great overarching principles that give life its depth, joy, texture and purpose; and that those principles arise not from artifice or practice, but from a Creator whose central principle is love when it comes to making these arguments and more, the atheist must remain mute. They still can and do hug and cry. But they cannot argue that life is anything other than an accident and death, the end of everything..."
25 posted on Friday, March 14, 2008 11:51:15 PM by Tony Snow
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Political Correctness: A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A cover article in Christianity Today by professors Daniel Taylor and Mark McCloskey said:
"In premodern times, the courage of a leader often had to be physical. In the last 500 years it is more often moral. Moral courage is the ability to do what's right even when it is deeply unpopular, even dangerous. Courage is only found where there is the genuine possibility of loss -- loss of friends, reputation, status, power, possessions or, at the extremes, freedom or life."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
107 posted on Thursday, May 21, 2009 9:40:19 AM by mewzilla (In politics the middle way is none at all. John Adams)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion
"When you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing
"When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors
"When you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by hard work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you
"When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice
You may know your society is doomed.
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand