I'm Back

I hope you all had a very blessed and happy Thanksgiving day with your loved ones. We sure did. We went to the mountains this year and celebrated Thanksgiving with my husband's side of the family. We always rotate Thanksgiving and Christmas between his family and mine and that has always worked very well for us. But now that our kids are having kids - I can tell we are going to have to get creative with this. My mother-in-law lives about 120 miles away from us. We live in the desert. She lives in the mountains and it is beautiful there. Strangely, there was no snow. Usually the ski hills try to open on Thansgiving weekend - but not this year. It seems like the weather is about a month off these days. They get just as much snow as always but it is arriving about a month late and sticks around a month longer in the spring. We had a wonderful, traditional menu and visited with family we don't see often enough. I made my first pumpkin roll - surprisingly easy - I don't know why I thought it would be so hard! We played games and cards and ate some more. We snuggled with baby Tyler and baby Ava Claire. We simply enjoyed being together. Which to me is what I am most thankful for. Thanksgiving is a good day isn't it?

It was good for me to take a break from blogging. I started realizing that every post I started was negative and I knew I needed to take some time to regroup and re-focus. I'm better now. I'm still having a difficult time trying to wrap my heart and my head about what is to come - but I'm doing better. And I'm ready to share what is happening in our family.

Oddly enough, it isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing and the first thing I want to say is how very proud I am of my daughter and son-in-law for being so open and willing to listen to God.

Brad and Michelle have accepted volunteer positions to work with a program called Extreme Nazarene in Peru for the next three years. As in, they are willing to sell everything they have including their house, and move to South America to use their skills and educations to help people who are helpless and hopeless.

As in, quitting their jobs and becoming totally dependent on volunteer supporters.

As in taking my sweet little grandson to another country to live. He won't come home again until he is almost four years old.

Hence, my anguish.

For the first two weeks after hearing this news, I cried more than I ever knew it was possible. My word did I cry. I thought I would dehydrate. It was so frustrating that I couldn't even think about it without tearing up in the most inconvenient of places. My office. The grocery store. Driving down the road. And church. Especially church. I have argued with God and yelled at God and pleaded with God and bartered with God. I finally just hushed up and stared reading His Word. I picked up my neglected Bible and strongly felt the Spirit urging me to read Matthew. And no kidding, the first page my eyes fell on was Matthew chapter 10. And I began to read about how if you love your daughter (and my Bible seemed to include son-in-law and grandson) more than you love God, then you are not worthy of Him. I read it several times and I knew I had to stop fighting what seems so inevitable.

They have a lot to do before they can really go. They are supposed to be there in Peru by February 10. February 10 is Michelle's birthday. Weird. They have to sell their house and their vehicles and raise half of the financial support they will need. It is a huge and monumental task before them. And I have to agree that if they are able to do it, it will only be because it is a God thing. And I am slowly beginning to understand that I not only have to accept this, I also have to help them.

I have to help them do what they need to do to move my sweet little boy to another country. For three years. I don't know how it will be humanly possible. Well, actually I know it is not humanly possible. I am depending on God's help to pull this off because no way can I do it on my own.

When I hold that sweet boy, tears just flow down my face and wash his hair. I hold him so tight he grunts at me. I have no idea how I am going to function not hearing his first words, not celebrating his first or his second or his third birthday with him, not seeing his first steps. It pains me more than I can write that we, his grandparents, will be strangers to him by the time he gets home.

I never knew that a broken heart could acutally hurt so much physically.

So there you have it. That's what has been going on in my life lately. Wow -talk about something coming out of left field. This was so unexpected and unplanned for. I feel like I am finally able to at least breathe normally. I can talk about it now and not cry. So I am making progress!

And I am realizing that I am indeed blessed to have a daughter who is doing what we raised her to do - obey God. And I am blessed to have a son-in-law that I know will take such good care of her and little Tyler - even in a foreign place. And if this truly happens, I know that I am blessed to be supported by a wonderful family and church family that will help me get through it. And I have been blessed beyond belief to have a sweet and beautiful little granddaughter that will help fill the void in our hearts and arms.

In the meantime, I am loving on a certain little boy like you can't believe and trying to figure out how I'm going to make it be enough to last for 1,095 days.