Life

*I wrote this blog on January 18, 2017...I've got to get out of this habit of not publishing when I write!

This blog is what happens when you've drank a little wine, watched a documentary about a very famous mother/daughter pair who died one after the other over the Christmas break while you watched one of them star in a movie, you're really trying to make sense of the fact that you're moving far away and starting a completely new life (complete with many deep life talks with your children because you desperately want them to grow to be healthy, Christ centered people), and one of your best friends has suddenly become a widow at the age of 36.  Life is the weirdest thing.  It's  so fleeting yet so long. So simple yet so complicated.  Sometimes it seems you just get a glimpse of the way God sees it and it can give you such peace.  So beautiful and fascinating when you feel the fullness of the emotion of life.  In this one moment, I can think of reasons to be so completely broken in despair and yet, because I know God personally through Jesus; I can at the same time see the wonder that is God's big picture.  The picture of love that is the beginning and the end.

It's such a struggle...sometimes you want to live exclusively for the eternal kingdom...sometimes you want to live for only the temporary here and now.  Sometimes you only feel the reality of the here and now and the eternal can seem so far off or even unreal.  I'm appreciative for the times, though they may be painful or feel scary, that I feel wholy attached to what is beyond this life.  The things of this life can never fully satisfy and I am grateful that there is a bigger picture that our loving God can see all of.