memories

OK. I started this the week of April 9 and am just now getting around to finishing it...

This weekend will mark the 25th anniversary of my mom's departure from this earth. Even after that much time, I still struggle with the Wisdom of my God in taking her when He did. She missed our engagement, the wedding, the births of both our kids, countless birthdays and Easters and Christmases...

But I have missed that knowing, motherly, listening ear and those gentle words or questions that were most often her counsel to me... I have missed her steadfast example of what looked like facile faithfulness both in ease and in difficulty, of what looked like a very natural faith both in blessing and in testing, of her radiant, humanly-inexplicable joy in the midst of the pain which ended in her home-going

I am comforted with the fact that for the believer to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (II Coprinthians 5:8) which assures me of her current location and (by the grace of God alone) our future reunion... but I still wish I could talk to her (or Dad) today.