itsawonderfilledlife

This one is gonna be a long one, because it is the culmination of a handful of blog entries that are still only drafts, they are … unfinished. So grab your coffee, or tea (from the unfinished blog entry ‘Re-Boiled Tea’, oh, and that’s for you mom … everyone who blogs knows that if no other person on the face of the earth reads your blogs, mom does … and dad, so get your glass of milk), and, of course, chocolate, and snuggle into your seat, it’s going to be a long one (if I get it ‘finished’)!

Now, where do I start? I know how to finish (I can finish the cake, finish reading the book, finish the chocolate, finish the yard work, finish the candy, but I digress). But starting can be more difficult.

I am not a news-lover! As a matter of fact, with hubby gone now for two weeks, the TV REMOTE is gathering dust! Oh, I spent countless hours enjoying reno. and do-it-yourself shows, but, my (undiagnosed) ADD (this is from the unfinished blog entry ‘My Daughter says I have ADD’) can stand TV for only so long!

I do love good news, though. And, recently I heard really good news.

My dad has been sick much of this past winter. He easily gets respiratory infections, pneumonia anything to do with lungs and breathing, he’s had it! He’s been admitted to hospital, drugged through the winter season with an assortment of medications that have been equally successful and failure in improving his condition, and had a butt-load of medical tests and procedures to uncover the root of his problems.

When there is ‘stuff’ going on in the lives of my family, I am so keenly aware of how far the east is from the west (from the unfinished blog entry of the same name). They live on the east coast, and I, on the west. They can watch the sun rise out of the Atlantic, and I can watch it set in the Pacific. They ‘get to have’ (they do not necessarily appreciate this privilege, as they got snow on April 1st  this year … April Fools!) snow in the winter, and I suffer (and everyone around me suffers in my vocal suffering) with a season called Monsoon Season. On the East Coast you can buy coastal properties for under $100,000, on the west coast coastal properties are too expensive to hotel at! On the east coast the humor is dry and sarcastic (from the unfinished blog ‘We Have Sarcasm Themed Dinners’ … Seriously!), on the west coast, humor is … shipped in from the east 😉  And, I digress, again!

Truly, living so far away is a sucky bummer (from the unfinished blog entry of the same name … you’re gonna love that one). There is no popping over for a ‘mom talk’, there is no being there for birthdays, and Father’s Day, and bumping into brothers at the mall, and having a house full of my kid’s cousins. There is also no spending occasions with cheek squeezing auntie (where I come from aunts is not pronounced ‘ants’. Ants crawl on the floor, but my aunts … hum, maybe this reasoning doesn’t work so well!), or that creepy uncle (lets face it, every family has at least one relative that is the personification of ‘creepy’) … hum, there are some benefits of living on the opposite coast 😉 .

So this week I heard good news, after all of the tests my dad has been going through, the results are in, and he is okay. No cancer (a relief, as his dad suffered with lung cancer before he died), no pneumonia, no nothing really, except for a virus that he had picked up while in the hospital, at some point. Apparently this virus will be residing in him, as long as he’s residing on planet Earth, and is not problematic unless it flares, but there is good, reliable medication for it that.

Ahhhhh! Good News is so Good!

And so, we all continue living our unfinished lives, in our temporary homes (from the unfinished blog of the same name). It makes me wonder, as I always do when confronted with news (good or bad) … what is the lesson, what is there to learn from this? I figure if something is going to get my heart rate up, or cause me to sweat, or make me laugh hysterically, or cry from the depths of my soul, or make me shake with anger … there must be something to learn from it (whatever ‘it’ is), that I can benefit from. Sometimes it is so much easier to see the ‘benefit’ than others, when it seems to only be a lesson, and a hard one at that.

It’s sort of like when a child touches something hot, after being told not to … that is a hard lesson, and, for the child, who is crying because her hand hurts, the idea of ‘benefit’ from the lesson goes unseen. But, as an adult, we can see that the lesson, although painful, has benefit, as the child will not enter into that danger again. Hum, I guess our experience provides a bigger perspective.

Kind of like our lives. But we are the child. We have ‘stuff’ in life that burns our hands, that burns our hearts, and hurts like crazy. We think there is no tomorrow (or wish there was no tomorrow, so that the pain, the agony the hard ‘stuff’ of life would be over). But, what we ‘children’ think we see as complete and whole … God, the bigger-picture seeing parent, sees as unfinished, and He sees a bigger picture.

I wish I had His lens!

But, for now I am thankful that my dad is okay, that his days are unfinished … I guess there is a lesson, something to learn from this  … for me, for him, for all of our family. I guess we need to seek out the answer to that, until it is … you know, finished.

^“We don’t yet see things clearly.

We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.

But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright!

We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness,

we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation:

Trust steadily in God,

hope unswervingly,

love extravagantly.

And the best of the three is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:12-13

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