Good morning…
Today, I celebrate the birthday of a special friend who, if she had been healthy on earth, would have blown out twelve candles on her birthday cake at her family’s dinner table tonight. Instead, at age seven, on 8.17.11, she was scooped up by God’s big arms of love and welcomed warmly into her forever home. Her five year cancer battle ended in victory and her mother’s Care Pages post on 8.17.14 described her daughter as “…freer and happier than ever in a place beyond our comprehension…in Heaven with Jesus.”
I love the friendship I share with her mother, deep and honest, tender and lasting. We have our favorite lunch spot on the banks of the Chattahoochee River where we commit to sharing a salad and a meaningful conversation nearly every month. Last Friday, we enjoyed our lunch together on a beautiful day. We talked about our families and the pain in our community, our mothering concerns and her family’s spring break mission trip to Peru with other families from our church.
Just before meeting, I had come away from my Friday Bible study where one woman shared a story of standing with her husband, in complete awe, watching their two year old son sleep. The husband whispered, “I love him so much. If something happened to him, I cannot image how I could go on.” And the wonderful woman sitting on my couch whispered to all of us hanging on her words, “I honestly felt in that moment that if something happened to my son the very next day, I would be so incredibly grateful we had shared two years and a day.”
I asked my friend who laid to rest her young daughter, “What do you think about that? How do you relate to that story?” Without missing a heartbeat she said, “It is just like the Dr. Suess quote that hangs on our wall, ‘Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.'”
Today, I smile more broadly because the loving life of this pinkalicious girl happened and her love lives on in the lives of so many of us who adore this faithful family. Every year, I share one unique gift with today’s birthday girl. At midnight tonight, she will pass along to me, from heaven to earth, her sparkly birthday wand and I will turn fifty three.
Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope! Romans 15:13 (MSG),
Sue
