- Not The Only One!
- 20 Jan 25
- Post #175
- ” Sometimes It’s Just So Hard”
- Howdy!
- This is an improv and a little gut wrenching honestly. Of course this isn’t what I was going to share, but this is what came out. I am a person who is fully aware of how our emotions can be just such a roller coaster at times , with the extreme highs and sometimes with the deepest of lows. I guess this is a consideration for us to actually think about how short and precious life actually is. I’m not trying to break hearts , but maybe somehow turn this into a prayer request, for all of you out there who believe in the power of prayer. Life can be so funny and odd and just so outlandish unpredictable. There are things and people and different situations that come at us from all sorts of angles and honestly all to often we don’t appreciate the significance of it , until it’s somehow in the rear view or that whole hindsight thing☺️☺️.
- I don’t really know how I would characterize my day to day. It wasn’t a bad day until it was. I try not to be so swayed by the highs and lows and mostly take the position that not many things surprise me in life because I know how broken we all are and just subject to disappointing one another from time to time for various reasons. There are those tough days that make you just stop and pause and think, and today turned into one of those. It’s not always about not having someone to cuddle with on a Friday night or a Saturday night date. Those things are great if you have them, but it’s about the days when you feel like someone just kicked you in the stomach, because you lost your job unexpectedly. It’s when you get a call from the police station about your kid being picked up for shoplifting. Honestly it’s about all of those dreaded unexpected, unplanned, unscripted moments in life, that to be honest , you wish that it was touching anyone else’s life but your own. Those are the times and the moments when you would just trade all of the Saturday night dates in for a real hug. Someone to grab and wrap your arms around them like you hadn’t seen them in years and you were just never going to let go and You don’t care about how badly they need to go pee☺️☺️.
- It’s playoff football on TV and a national college football champion hanging in the balance, all is well and then life does one of those things that it does, without ever asking for our permission. Let’s be honest, if we knew, we would never say yes to it. What kind of crazy person wants to welcome pain and sorrow into their life….not me!!. This is a story that started for me some four years ago , well more like three, but it had roots that took me back to a year or two prior, which kind of left me at one of my lowest points. It’s when you think that you have found the elusive ” one” , and then you get a not so fast buddy☺️☺️ . It’s funny how pain can be such a freshening reminder of how you choose to over look so many red flags, not glaring, but nevertheless present. So that one was on me and on me it was. It has a way of changing you in ways that you never thought about or dreamed imaginable.
- This is a story that I have told before, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it , but so is the subsequent story and if you search the archives, you can find it under a post called ” Rock Star”. I don’t want to refer to it as tentacles, but again life has all of these curves and speed bumps that we just never see coming and this is one of these. When I was at a very low point in my life , I encountered someone else at the very same crossroads. They became a very dear and close friend, considering that we only had a couple of years together, but felt like I had known her for so much longer, and we only met face to face one time. Well a little over a year ago, I lost her as she lost her battle waiting on a kidney transplant. I had never ever met someone so strong and full of life, and at the same time deathly ill and sick. A crazy sense of humor and such a sharp wit. Sometimes God will give you a gift, by the people that He places in your life and that’s how I saw Amy. The gift was not a stand alone, but it came with a support staff ☺️☺️.
- The support staff is what has me hear today. Amy in some way, I’m not exactly sure how, but she endeared me to her family before she went to be with Jesus. It presented itself as this odd little triangle between three states. Amy was in Ohio, her sister resides in West Virginia and their parents in North Carolina almost down to the south Carolina border, so a little spread out. God gave me the gift of Amy and Amy regifted me to her family. It was like paying it forward in some way that I had not seen before. She befriended me and left me behind to be and encouragement to her mom and sister. I don’t know how or why she thought that I was the kind of person that would be the right fit for that job. Here is the astounding part of the story, at least for me, I only met Amy face to face one time and I have never met or seen her support staff outside of pictures. I have texted with and spoken with both over the phone, but somehow the crazy connection that I had with Amy was passed on to her mom and sister. I will never forget the night that we were all on the phone together, and it was the night that Amy passed away, just a few short days before Christmas….what a bummer.
- Our connection only seemed to get stronger without having Amy as a go between. A huge part of the story was that her mother Anne, was just severely heart broken as you could imagine after loosing a child. Amy’s sister Kris would call or text and ask me to check in with her mom, because of the friendship that Amy and I had formed, she enjoyed hearing from me and talking about Amy. I completely get it and I just had a not so subtle reminder myself last week as my mother was remembering my baby sister on her birthday and she was my mom’s one and only daughter. I’ve said it before, but there is just something so unnatural and backwards, when parents have to bury their children. Fast forward to the one year anniversary of Amy’s passing and I checked in with her mom and sister and I found out that Anne had taken a fall and broken her hip. I was really hoping to stop and meet her face to face on my way to Florida to visit my daughter, but it just never materialized. Anne spent time in a rehab facility and was in a significant amount of pain. I had sent her a card , wishing her a speedy recovery. This is some of my weird brain stuff, but when I was younger, not really sure what age, but there was a company called Morton’s and they produced salt and it had a picture of a little girl on the box holding an umbrella protecting her from the rain. Well, we pour salt from the box, and most are familiar with the saying of when it rains it pours. I know that it’s two different contexts there, but perhaps it’s just a weird Segway to talk about what happens next.
- It’s not so much about waiting for the other shoe to drop, because there was no expectation of anything out of the blue, but that is precisely what I got, out of the blue. I indulged myself in a nap, and when I got up, I had received a text from Kris that her mother had taken another fall. This fall worse than the previous one, and now her mother is on hospice. What? Wait! How did this happen or take place? It’s not that it’s insignificant, but the reality remains that it did happened, and a very precious life is slipping away. I know that unexpected things take place in our lives everyday, but I was hoping and praying for some kind of a corner to be turned for Anne, because she had just suffered so much over the death of her daughter. That is how her sister ended the text. Mom and Amy will be together again, soon. Heart broken didn’t begin to describe my disbelief. I was just hoping that there would be a different outcome and something with more joy attached to it. I think to scripture when King David was pleading with God over his son that had been conceived out of an adulterous affair and again later when he grieved over Absalom, he was inconsolable and that it what Anne was. She was inconsolable over the death of her daughter . It’s not a flipped response, but I remember speaking with my sister the day before she passed, but there is joy on the other side for those who know Jesus.
- I think maybe most of us know someone who has been terminally ill or who has been sick and suffered for a long time, and it almost seems merciful when they pass, but for me, this wasn’t that. Anne’s pain was a heart pain and in ways she didn’t want it to heal, because she felt that it somehow dishonored her daughter and her memory. We all grieve differently and there is no right way or wrong way to do that, it’s just so personal and individualistic. There is just something about death that makes us personalize it. People say that it forces us to grapple with our own mortality , and it does. I had a moment. I’m not afraid to die. I know that unless the Lord Jesus Christ returns, that we all have a date with death, but there is such a humongous difference between going home and just thinking about it as taking the big old dirt nap. Honestly!, it just breaks my heart for people who have no more than living for today, because tomorrow we die. I know my fair share of people who believe and live this way. I say my fair share, but to just know one such person, is to know one too many. I know more than I should.
- Each week I get to pray with a group of individuals and that is their collective hearts cry, that people will invite God into their lives. I have punched at this week after week and will continue to do so as long as God continues to grant me breath. God loves you…..period!!!! He wants to adopt you into his family. He has prepared a place for you, a very nice place, not a dirt nap.☺️ I want to say that I don’t understand people, but that’s not true. I remember running fast and far away from God. I remember doing anything and everything that I wanted to do without regards for other people, let alone consideration for God Himself. I remember seeking out adventures and possessions hoping to find something that would stick and stay to satisfy my craving for joy, peace and contentment. I well up with sorrow, when I think about how I use to live and the way that I use to be , with everyone and everything being a means to an end. Talk about heart breaking, there it is right there, front and center. When I was in my twenties I was just so full of myself and some say that is still true ☺️☺️, but nothing like back then. I use to run with a really rough crowd and I will say that I’m only still here by the grace of God. That being said, we only get a limited amount of time here, all of our days are numbered. I knew some really tough and rowdy people, not all guys, but a lot of them are no longer here, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that some left the planet without knowing God, just such deep deep sorrow. There was myself and a few others, with really, really , absolutely the hardest of hearts, and God took pity on us and changed us from the inside out.
- I’m not the person that I once was, neither am I all that God has calls me to be, but I’m striving in that direction ☺️☺️. I can honestly tell you that I get up each and every morning and there is still some of the old me there, but to such a lesser degree and it has become a tool for God to use , to share my story with other tough guys and girls. I know that some believe that our culture has become so soft and saturated with feminism, that we no longer have tough guys and girls, but I’m here to refute that and tell you, that if you choose to do life apart from God, then you are a tough one ☺️☺️. He has gone out of His way to pursue you with His love and that was supremely on display at calvary, where He sacrificed His son, so that you could have fellowship with Himself. It’s a free gift to you, all you have to do is accept it. I may be a little off the rails here, but all that we are or ever hope to be falls under God’s domain, so before we part ways today, I want to bring this back home.
- Home is where Anne is headed, and yes she will be reunited with her daughter that she has just missed horribly, but I suspect that reunion will pail in comparison to being in the presence of Almighty God. So!, this is it , please pray for my friends and especially for Kris. She has so much on her. She not so long ago went trough all of this with her sister and now with her parents. She is the one charged with packing up all of the memories of a lifetime and having to fight back tears and emotions to get through it all. She is the faced with her life being just a little less full than she once remembered. I know that she is not the only person in the world who has had to walk down this road, and some I dare to say with even heavier burdens than this, but I still covet each and everyone of your prayers for her. Life is short and sweet and precious at times, but there are other times, when ” sometimes It’s Just hard”
- Till Next Time ✌️ peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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