Monday, January 12, 2009

A week of trials


I realize I haven’t written much at all lately. I also realize there are likely only a handful of people who come here often enough to realize. No delusions of grandeur here!

I haven’t had a week that made it very easy to write about the light-hearted things I normally write about. Well, I shouldn’t say I have had a terrible week; it’s more so that several of my dear friends are shouldering heavy burdens. I hurt when they hurt, but I doubt my sorrow equals their pain.

So, somehow a weekend update just doesn’t cut it. I won’t share all the details of the struggles my friends are all dealing with, and I would imagine all but a handful of you already know them anyway. But to give you a synopsis: We have friends saying good-bye to their mother, we have friends clinging to every precious moment with their newborn daughter, and we have friends facing some scary health issues. At times this week, I froze every time the phone rang. It was a week when I started to wonder how much people could handle before their shells cracked.

Then God sent two reasons to believe that life will go on. Two of our friends welcomed sons into the world this week. I did a newborn session with one of them Saturday and will do a session with the other later this week. It was bittersweet cuddling a brand new life knowing my friend would give anything to have the same experience. I also knew her pain equaled this family’s joy and didn’t want to damper their homecoming a bit. It was a reminder of how precious life is and what a gift God gives us in our children.

It was a week of lessons. It was a week of praying for miracles and realizing my life is full of them. It was a week where I was once again reminded how important friendship is. I feel very, very blessed that I have deep-rooted friendships with women I’ve known since elementary school. I feel equally blessed to have found a tightly-knit group of friends within the place we’ve called home for ten years. I’m overcome that God continues to drop new people into my life when I kind of decide I have too many relationships to manage and she becomes one of my closest confidantes.

There is no question women can be catty, but the same lot will rally around each other with fervor when one of us is wounded. I’ve seen it many times, but especially this week. Between phone calls, text messages, Facebook messages, and e-mails; I was tired of talking. That’s saying a lot. But, that’s what we do. We go to each others’ sides, even if it is virtually and we prop each other up until we can walk on our own again. All of what we’ve experienced this week will add to the history we share; which bounds us together even tighter.

My friend Annie sent this video to me and it couldn’t have been timelier. (Grammar check suggests I use “timelier,” so I’m going for it.) I forwarded it to my O-Town girls who were all huddled in their own pain wishing so desperately we could all be together to get one of our own through another tragedy. It’s definitely worth the five minutes it takes to watch and it does a much better job at conveying the point of this entire post. Maybe I'll work on brevity in 2009!

1 comment:

michelleb said...

Oh Les, I admire your way with words! I too, wish we could have gotten our flock of pigeons together last weekend. I cherish our bond!