Tag Archives: love

Who Am I to Cry?

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It is so easy to throw a pity party…just invite me, myself, and I, a few bad memories, a couple of hurtful comments, a large box of super soft tissues for the tears and you’re off to the doldrums!

And then some uninvited guests show up. People who actually care about you; who are ready to cry with you, if needed, but more importantly, are there to let you know you’re not alone in sadness.

One such guest showed up this morning, online, and shared with me the story of her cousins who were momentarily about to lose their precious seven-year-old son to cancer. This dear little boy is losing, or has lost, as I write, his battle with that demon disease. I’m crying for this friend and her cousins.

A similar story came my way a couple of years ago, via another friend who witnessed almost the exact same scenario with friends of hers and their seven year old grandson.

A fellow blogger reminded me of the story she posted of her mother succumbing to cancer’s clutches, and the crushing feeling of helplessness she experienced at that time.

And then there was Kristiana, a dear little member of our church, whose face I can see to this day, who also left her family and friends in a state of sadness for her loss, but also a state of happiness for Christ’s gain. She was thirteen and had fought her battle for nine years.

 

And so I’m reminded, although we don’t expect to be hurt by the ones we love, it happens: whether by death-which is out of our hands-or unkind remarks, which are also out of our hands, we are, if we are caring people, going to be hurt. Guaranteed. It goes without saying, if we don’t care we won’t hurt.

As always, God has a way of catching me off-guard and causing me to smile through my tears. It happened at nine o’clock this morning, when the child in me began to sing “Jesus loves me, this I know…” and that’s all I needed to know. Everything else is secondary.

So, who am I to cry? Just another person who bleeds when cut, and thankful for those who come by with bandages.

May God bless all those who stand by with those boxes of tissues. I love you.

 

 

 

Feelings

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Here is something different. In one of my writing books, the exercise was to describe in your own words the meaning of certain feelings we all experience–to just write down the first thing that comes to mind. It’s unfortunate that I don’t always note where I read these things, thereby giving credit to whoever dreams them up, but the truth is I don’t. In any case here is my take on the following feelings.

What is happy?  It is a light airy feeling that bubbles inside me out of the blue sometimes.

What is frustration?  It is a tear your hair out feeling when you can’t get through to someone.

What is sadness?  It is a pain in the heart and a lump in the throat for the pain of others.

What is anger?  It is a boiling feeling of inner turmoil.

What is love?  It is an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and a heart bursting feeling.

What is scared?  It is a pee-your-pants weak-in-the-knees queasy feeling.

What is joy?  It is bigger than happy, bigger than love, and contains them both.

What is pettiness?  It is not a good feeling once you have participated in it.

What is excited?  It is the thought of something new coming your way, something new to explore and have good feelings about.

What is adventurous?  Doing something you have never done before regardless of the consequences.

What is critical?  Not letting people be themselves, always correcting or trying–picky, picky.

That was a good exercise, and I found it enlightening.

Sometimes it pays to pay attention to our feelings, and not just take them for granted. Especially anger–who needs that?

The Bible expounds on feelings over and over again, and the most popular of these is love. Just look in any concordance to see how many times love is mentioned…1 Corinthians 13 is a great example..But the greatest of these is love. (verse 13)

Comments?

Seventy Times Seven

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Today I am going to post a full chapter from my now published book, My Precious Life.  It can be found at Amazon.com, Amazon.Ca, Westbow Press, and many other online book stores. As well, copies will be available through me for residents of Ontario, and some other provinces. And now, Seventy Times Seven:

A Lesson in Forgiveness

The anger I carried inside was making me sick. It felt like a grapefruit-size growth taking up precious space in my body, threatening to annihilate me, and it was directed at my husband. We had recently separated, and it was not amicable. Bill’s verbal abusiveness and alcohol dependence had taken its toll on our twenty-one year marriage.

One day, my sister came to visit. She knew about the separation, but did not know the details. I had shared these with no one. Eyeing me over the rim of her coffee cup, Mary bluntly said, “Patsy, you look very unhappy.” Astute observation, I thought. Suddenly, I was spilling over with words of rage, anger, hate and hurt; all the emotions that made up that grapefruit inside me.

“I hate him so much it’s making me sick,” I told her.

“Have you prayed about it?” Mary asked.

“No,” I admitted, “I haven’t.”

It was food for thought, and I chewed on it for several days before finally crying out to God, “Please help me to stop hating him!” But the feeling was still there. I prayed to be released from the agony of negative emotions my life had become. You need to go to church. It was a pop-up thought out of the blue. I remembered the quaint little church one of our daughters had been married in. It reminded me of a small country church from my childhood.

One Sunday morning found me sitting in a sun-bathed pew, listening to a sermon on a part of The Lord’s Prayer; a prayer I had memorized since my high-school days.

Give us this day our daily bread, was this week’s message. The pastor had been giving a series of sermons on this popular prayer, and I wished I had heard the previous messages. It was comforting being in the hushed sanctuary, hearing the sermon, and listening to hymns and prayers, but when I left, my grapefruit was still with me. The following Sunday, the sermon was on forgiveness.

“Holding hatred and anger towards others can make us sick,” Rev. MacNeill said. “We have to learn to forgive.”

He quoted a scripture in which Jesus told his disciple, Peter, he must forgive, not only seven times, but seventy times seven. I left the church with those words reeling around in my head. My new prayer was, God, please help me to forgive, seventy times seven. It didn’t happen overnight, but gradually the hate began to dissolve, and the grapefruit with it.

I continued going to church, and found solace there week after week. The love I had allowed to be smothered began to resurface, and life became liveable again. One day, Bill phoned to rant and rave about something real, or imagined, as was his custom. I stayed silent until the tirade was over.

“Pat, are you there?” he yelled.

“I am,” I said, “and I love you.”

Where did those words come from? His incredulous, “What?” prompted my next words.

“I love you, Bill, but not in a romantic way. I love you seventy times seven.”

I had found that forgiveness and love went hand in hand.

Thereafter, communication was more reasonable, and in the end we became friends, and remained so until his dying day many years later.

“Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:21,22)

A Dying Love

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This is not what you might think it is when you read the title. It is not about love dying between two people; it is about the one who is the object of love dying. In this case it is about babies and their mothers. Here are two photos of mothers holding their sick infants, knowing that the end is near. Both babies died of unknown diseases, were the firstborn to both mothers and were baby boys. Notice the eye contact in each photo. When the pictures came my way, I immediately felt the poignancy and knew that some day I would have to write about them. Both mothers went on to give birth again; one had three more sons and two daughters and the other, three daughters. Neither mother ever forgot their experience of a dying love…and their love never died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love in the Afternoon

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It was four o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, May 31, 2014. The venue was Mill Run Golf Course in Uxbridge, Ontario.

The near-by pond was perfectly still in the soft, spring breeze, and the air was full of birdsong and love.

My beautiful granddaughter, Laura, was marrying her high-school sweetheart, Cameron.

As the groom waited expectantly on the lush grass, the bridal party advanced along a carpeted path towards him: six beautiful young ladies dressed in knee-length, burgundy dresses, tan, calf-high, cowboy boots, and each carrying a white baby’s-breath bouquet. The groom’s men were elegant in their blue-grey suits, dark grey ties, and matching pocket squares.

Six-year-old Taylor, the sweetest flower girl ever, followed with a small wagon in which Jack, the four-month old ring-bearer, was ensconced, dressed in a tiny grey suit and little cap to shade his head. Taylor looked like an angel, and not only pulled baby Jack in the wagon, but scattered rose petals along the way. This little beauty is one of my great-granddaughters, so I was especially touched.

And then came the moment Cam was waiting for. His lovely bride, in a stunning, strapless, gown of white, layered satin and lace, walked slowly towards her husband-to-be on the arm of her extremely proud father.

I will interject here, that it was to be a strictly secular affair, but when the official began to speak, it became clear that God was at this wedding, and I could not contain my happy tears.

Being surrounded with all that beauty and love was enough in itself to make my heart burst with joy, but when God showed up so unexpectedly that Saturday afternoon, my joy was complete.

I can’t close without telling you that when I later told Laura how thrilled I was with the ceremony, she confided that the minister, knowing they were a secular couple, asked if they wanted to leave anything out and Cam said, “No, we’ll leave it in for Nana”. I’m almost moved to tears writing this, because secular or not, God’s love, true and unconditional, was evident that lovely Saturday afternoon.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20)

A Letter of Love

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Thank you my child, for being the person you are.

To know you is to know a sensitive, caring, loving and loyal young being. When you entered this world you were born to be a blessing to all who would know you. You were born to love, to learn, to teach, to share, to be you in all the ways that being you is possible.

As life is lived there are lessons to learn. First you learn to walk and talk. It seems to take forever, and after stumbling and stammering countless times, you succeed. You are now free to pursue other areas of this wonderful journey of life. Soon you begin to discover yourself. After accomplishing walking and talking you find yourself being taught what is generally known as discipline. Some refer to it as being ‘picked on’. Discipline is a very important part of life’s lessons. Without it you wonder what is expected of you by your peers, yourself, figures of authority, and the world in general. Hopefully it is very early in life that most of us learn this most important lesson. You did and you accepted the responsibility that goes with it.

Now you can walk, talk, think, feel, learn, discern and enjoy being the wonderful person you were born to be.

Then it happens.Your world as you know it is suddenly distorted by the views and actions taken by the special people in your life. The people you have loved all your life.

Well, child, these people also learned how to walk, talk, think, feel, learn and discern, and now it appears to you that they seem to have forgotten the real meaning of all these lessons.

We learn to walk through life with those in our lives.

We learn to talk and communicate with those in our lives.

We learn to think about life and those in our lives.

We learn to know our feelings, and to think of the feelings of others.

We learn to tell the difference between living for ourselves and having consideration for others.

We continue to learn by keeping our minds open to all these things, allowing us to discern between what we expect our lives to be like and what our lives are really like.

Now we are faced with decisions our loved ones have made regarding their own lives. These are their decisions. We may not like or agree with them, and when the consequences affect our lives, we begin asking ourselves the question, why are we being confronted with this bizarre behavior? In our minds it is bizarre behavior. Having learned to respect ourselves and others we are suddenly dealing with whatever it is that has prompted these special people to act out this part of their life journey. Sadly, we find our respect for them diminishing.

The key words though, are, their life journey. We hurt. We cry. We find our loyalties being pulled in all directions. Our life is not the same. When will it all end? When will everything get back to normal? Why does it have to be this way? What can we do about it? How can we change it?

The answers are inside you. The answers are what you have been learning, thinking, feeling and doing since you were born. You have learned your lessons well and the time has come to apply them.

You allow your loved ones to walk their paths.

You tell them your feelings, but you let them walk their paths.

You think of them as their own persons, with their own thoughts and feelings, which are separate from yours.

You love them and know that although they are on a different path at this moment they still love you.

Just know that whatever decision has been made in their lives, though it affects yours, your only responsibility to them is to continue to love them. Their decisions can only harm you if you cease to be true to yourself. You have discipline. As you continue to love them unconditionally, not allowing their actions to influence your thinking or behavior in a negative way you will come to accept the path they have chosen. It may or may not be the right one for them, and in your mind it is certainly not the right one for you. For now it must be.

In closing, let me remind you to live your life free from the guilt others would impose upon you, free from the necessity to impose guilt upon others, and free to love and be loved unconditionally.

This is the way I love you. This is the way God loves you. This is the way love is.

(This letter was written many years ago to some very special people in my life).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen Up

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I go to church, not only to worship God, but to hear him speak to me through our Pastor or a guest speaker. What I have heard over the years has been food, not only for my soul, but for My Precious Life.  “Faith Comes Through Hearing” are not empty words. I really enjoyed writing this chapter.

Chapter Thirty-Five  –  Listen Up

Pastor Duncan told us in one of his sermons–and I quote— “What Jesus invites us to share is a lifetime of learning, a lifetime of growing, a lifetime of being changed by Him and through Him. With Him we know that nothing is impossible! God gives us opportunities to share the story of our faith, and we can’t neglect this responsibility.” End of quote.

This is my opportunity to share the many ways God has spoken to me over the years, and in the telling, maybe you’ll remember ways he has spoken to you, too.

One Sunday, a guest Pastor at our church mentioned going for a walk to ease a burdened mind. As he walked, he noticed an extremely white piece of wood on his path, and a scripture came to mind: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” (Isaiah, 1:18)

I have no idea what that had to do with his spirits that day, but the fact that God spoke to him, through a piece of white wood on a sidewalk, reassured me of the things I am going to share with you…..

“He who has an ear, let him hear.” (Revelation 13:9). In other words–listen up!

Tomorrow  –  You’re Too Pretty to Smoke  –  A Lesson in Empathy