Those Stories

This has been a busy season for me with my daughter getting married in July. At least once a week, we have to hurry over to the mall and get something. That my daughter wants me to go along is part of the fun. I have a blog idea I want to work on when I have time. It is a ministry I was part of some time ago and I need to combine several of my writings to do it justice. I just don't have time now. So I was doing my usual Tuesday housecleaning and said to the Lord, "I truly don't have anything to post." I went on about my business.

Now cleaning is one of those things where my mind relaxes and plays with ideas. I'm not trying to do anything. It just does all the work. So before I knew it, I had the genesis of an idea for a blog. I love that. It happens to me all the time.

On one of our shopping trips, I was saying to Dawn, my daughter, how I kept telling stories at family get-togethers and I realized they were not, shall we say, "fresh ideas." I said, "I think I tell them because I'm afraid that I will forget some of those little things you kids did when you were small." That would be a tragedy to me. As much as I love my children now, and I do treasure their grown up personae, their baby selves are still as precious to me as if they were still young.

Once at Aglow, a speaker said, "Sometimes your children hear from Heaven." She was right. We were then in the Y2K stages of 1999. She showed me that my son, Joe, was right when he said not to worry. Now I felt the same truth ring out as my daughter said, "But you have all those pictures."

Oh, course she was right as well. In every photo, I can remember vividly how each child felt, how my husband felt, what was going on at the time of the picture. It is just a gift I have that I guess I had forgotten. So I can look at my multiple picture albums and remember all the little stories and enjoy each one, and even recall incidents that had not yet formed into stories.

Now I am determined to "ponder these things and treasure them in my heart" and the need to tell will be a lot less.

My family is a wonderful group of loving people. They are generous and forgiving. I look forward to talking with them about today and their future. That's a good place to start.