Today's Gift

(thoughts from yesterday that I didn't get a chance to write then)

The late summer sunshine peeks through the branches of the birch tree outside my kitchen window creating streaks of light across the counter as I do dishes once again.  I have watched this tree blossom through spring and share it's branches with various birds throughout the summer.  Now it's leaves are beginning to turn brown and wrinkly, that disease of Fall that inevitably strikes every leaf-bearing tree.  I do not look forward to the day those leaves start leaving those branches to cover my lawn with hours of raking and bagging.

I consider this gorgeous day a gift.  After a week of gray and rainy, the chance to get outside and spend some time at a park by the lake with my children is a chance for my heart to heal just a little more.

Friends, don't under-estimate the pain caused by a miscarriage.  I hadn't meant to go this way today, but here we are.  It takes time to heal from this loss, and bit by bit, I am getting there.  Slowly, day by day, God provides gifts of light to ease the hurt in my heart.

My children, so precious, are two of those gifts.  To see the two of them playing along the beach, picking up stones and sticks and tossing them into the water, so innocent and free of worldly cares, a reminder of how to have child-like faith.  The lake breeze blows the waves hard onto the stony shore.  I sit with my face to the sun and just breathe, soaking in the last precious moments of summer.

(And back to today...)

It appears that yesterday's sunshine continues today, and maybe we'll have yet one more chance to enjoy the last days of summer.  Somehow, it's easier to cherish the sunny days when I know that they'll soon be ending.

And today's gift:  I've had the flowers for a while now, but the morning sun sneaked through the window in our front entrance-way and peeked around the corner to shine beams of light into the dining room and straight onto these flowers, a gift from Tim and the kids, and now a further gift of glowing warmth and beauty.

May you, dear readers, take the time to see God's love for you today in the gifts of light around you.

"You, O Lord, keep my lamp burning;
my God turns my darkness into light." Psalm 18:28