A Year

It is amazing to me the difference a week can make. Last week we celebrated my daughter's first birthday. Today I remember my grandmother's passing a year ago. I remember having this same bittersweet feeling last year. I was so excited to have my daughter in my life. We had just finished having her newborn photos taken and my mother was in town helping us out. When she came to pick me and Kate up at the photographer's, she told me that Grandma had passed overnight. My grandmother was so many things to me. But instead of having a hole where she used to be, I shine with all the things she taught me. 

My most precious thing I received after her passing was the white glass fruit bowl that always sat in the middle of her table. It was never empty. 

I have felt empty. Many times over the last year. Not only because of her absence, but because of poor decisions I was making. Many of you know that I was in school to become a therapist. One of the last conversations I had with my grandmother was about this. She told me that I should always do what glorified God and made him happy. The tricky thing about my grandmother was she always had pearls of wisdom like this, but she never had a full explanation of what it meant. So I have decided that her pearls where more like the rocks that enter the oyster and it is up to me to make them into a pearl. I interpreted this phrase into many things along the way trying to make my pearl. Once I stopped trying to make the rock into something it wasn't, I got my pearl. The oyster doesn't try to make the rock into a pearl. It just does it's job and it creates the pearl along the way. So I prayed about what my job really was and my pearl just happened. It did not involve being a therapist, it involved me being me. 

There was a line in a book called Storyline that said your job does not define you. Once I learned to define myself , I became who I have always wanted to be. This is the lesson my grandmother was trying to teach me when she told me things like "whatever you do, make sure it glorifies God". She wanted us to find our way with her guidance. Not tell us how to live our lives. She always said the best lessons are the ones you learn yourself. So along the way I have learned to ask myself, "how could I glorify him when I was so focused on myself; when I wasn't my happiest and I wasn't using the gifts he gave me?"

My Grandmother was an amazing leader, a wise teacher and fantastic mother to more than just her family. These are things I aspire to be. I want to have a table where family and friends gather, feel welcome and leave feeling happier. I want a place my kids can ask me the hard questions about faith and life, where I might lead one of them to give their lives to God like I did with her and where I can continue my ministry; whatever it may become in the future. I want to honor my grandmother in all things I do. 

The first way I chose to honor my grandmother was to trust God to guide me to where I am and continue to trust him to lead me through whatever may come. My anxiety was always a concern to her and was at the top of her prayer list. She told me she prayed for me from the first day she knew about me to (I'm sure) the night she passed. She told me I was a blessed little girl, protected by God. I want to honor her by remembering that on a daily basis and not giving into my anxiety. I want to trust God. And I will because, even though i didn't learn this lesson before she passed, this is a lesson my Grandmother taught me. 

I want to create a table worthy of having this white glass fruit bowl in the middle of it. I want it to be one of the first things I see in the morning so I can remember my Grandmother on the good days, the bad days and every day in between.