" It’s funny how that happens— how we can manufacture something, like a fancy dinner date or vacation— and it can disappoint or even hurt in our memory, and then God will go and give you a beautiful moment in the worst time, or simply heal your memory in a way that makes you look back on a hard day and say, “I’ll never forget the way that person loved me.” "
So beautiful how God can turn something around just like that! Blessings to you and yours.
You’re last paragraph! My goodness that really hit home for me. All my life I considered myself a “place person” too until I moved away from my life long home. I feel too that God is using motherhood to teach me the infinite value of being a people person. It reminds me of Lewis’s quote that we meet no mere mortals. To be a wife and the mother of little ones really does expand the heart infinitely and heals those old wounds of losing place. Thanks for sharing! 🫶🏻
"[God will] simply heal your memory in a way that makes you look back on a hard day and say, 'I’ll never forget the way that person loved me.'” This is putting succinctly what I was trying to get at in a poem I wrote this past summer. Witnessing my dad live and die with Alzheimers for 15 years was hard days. But when I miss him, I look back and the intervening time seems to sift out the sweet moments from all the bitterness of those years.
"I only know that as a mind departs, it says goodbye
" It’s funny how that happens— how we can manufacture something, like a fancy dinner date or vacation— and it can disappoint or even hurt in our memory, and then God will go and give you a beautiful moment in the worst time, or simply heal your memory in a way that makes you look back on a hard day and say, “I’ll never forget the way that person loved me.” "
So beautiful how God can turn something around just like that! Blessings to you and yours.
You’re last paragraph! My goodness that really hit home for me. All my life I considered myself a “place person” too until I moved away from my life long home. I feel too that God is using motherhood to teach me the infinite value of being a people person. It reminds me of Lewis’s quote that we meet no mere mortals. To be a wife and the mother of little ones really does expand the heart infinitely and heals those old wounds of losing place. Thanks for sharing! 🫶🏻
Thank you for this beautiful meditation on the gifts our children are and could be to one another.
I just wrote last week on the question, So, are you done (having children?
I believe this is another reason to welcome the babies God sends.
God bless you and your young family.
This is exquisite.
"I can literally feel my heart growing, like the Grinch." Me, too, friend. Me, too.
"[God will] simply heal your memory in a way that makes you look back on a hard day and say, 'I’ll never forget the way that person loved me.'” This is putting succinctly what I was trying to get at in a poem I wrote this past summer. Witnessing my dad live and die with Alzheimers for 15 years was hard days. But when I miss him, I look back and the intervening time seems to sift out the sweet moments from all the bitterness of those years.
"I only know that as a mind departs, it says goodbye
a bitter hard farewell, made sweet somehow
by the intervening years, a well
of fading memories, the longing of the heart now
for a shred of whatever used to be."
It and one other (which still needs to be written) are by far the most personal poems I (will) have ever put together. https://soundingoutthewonder.substack.com/p/hidden-in-the-hollow-of-his-blessed
We really never feel God change us. We all of a sudden just notice that it's happened, like I did in the middle of reading the last paragraph of this.