The Beginning...March 9th 2008

If you live long enough and pay attention, you will begin to see that there are “seasons” in life. You find yourself talking about things in reference to a particular “season” in life, “that was when the boys were young,” or “when Momma was sick,” or “when I was in school,” etc. It seems we best remember events in life around other life events. Sometimes that is good and sometimes those past events and memories seem to have a negative effect on the present. And if we are not careful, we can let the past infect the present and miss some very special blessings, gifts from God.

I imagine that my family will define these past seven years as the “season” of loss. What started with a loss of community has spiraled into the loss of an adult child, and later his girlfriend in an accident that led to the close call on the life of our other adult child. There have been so many other losses along the way, minor in comparison, yet magnified because of the long string of significant losses. As the collection grows, you begin to wonder if your heart is growing hard as you mentally toss another loss into the “basket of losses,” just chalking it up as another one, all the while wondering, just what is God doing here?

Saturday night was a night much like the night before the accident that would take Allison’s life and leave our remaining son’s life hanging in the balance. My husband and I sat around the bonfire we had built, the first one of its type since the accident, and I looked up at the stars as I so often do. It was unseasonable weather, much like that time a little over a year ago and the full raw emotion of the season of loss came flooding back in.

Our son’s four wheeler lives at our house and so I knew he would be going four wheeling the next day and I felt the fullness of the fear of what could be around the next corner. The floodgates of the sadness and the fear of all that had been and all that could be, came flying open and I was once again reduced to the deepest, rawest, body shaking kind of sobbing pain.

My husband said in the most compassionate way, as he had so many times heard me “preach” to him, “Lynn, name five things you are grateful for.” I immediately could name him, my son and the security of a home and provision, but in the depth of my brokenness, I had to think hard, because the exercise I had practiced for years was not easy in this moment. And then it came spewing out, with all its pain…Elliot…and Allison…and it seemed at that moment, although wrecked with sorrow and grief, other things began to come to mind.

I went to sleep that night, fearful that it would be another restless one, filled with dreams of those things that were past. I knew the routine. But it wouldn't be my dream that night that would speak to me. It would be my husband’s. And in his dream was something important, and it was something called “Moments of Gratitude.”

I fearfully went to church on the Sunday that was so much like the day of the accident making sure I didn’t wear the same pants I wore the day of the accident(how God must laugh at some of the idiotic things we do). I forced myself to try and live in the moment. The fear and pain of that day a little over a year ago, stayed with me all day as I pushed through it, talking to God and trying to dismiss it as the foolishness I wanted to believe it was.

Dark had settled in and I was back in the bonfire business and as I tended the fire, I just kept asking God to bring my son back safe from the day of trail riding. And then... I heard from the distance, “I see lights on the driveway” and my heart took a deep sigh of relief. He was back. He had made it. I had made it. It was a day so like another, YET, it was so very different. Moments of gratitude…an unseasonably warm day, bonfires and the gift of the presence of two of my three favorite men. And God carried me through these moments.
They weren’t my only gift that day…words spoken by God to me through a friend, and a time in worship to hear God speak…Moments of Gratitude…Moments of Gratitude. And on that day, as I struggled to stay in the present and fought off the infection of the past, a call was born to share with you all, my “Moments of Gratitude.”

“A season of loss” may be what we recall as its name, but we are moving towards the remembrance of another great season of loss, the loss of what people in His day thought was their Savior, only to see Him ridiculed, mocked, beaten and killed as the worst of criminals. How dark that “Friday” must have been for no one knew what was to come. All they knew was that their hope was gone.

And look what happened in what seemed to be the darkest of moments! He lives! Yes, even in what seems so dark and so ordinary…He lives! And, that, my dear friends, is why, even in our own pain and depths of despair we can always find “moments of gratitude” and light in our darkness!

Join me as I live each day, expecting the moments that I see God in all His wonderful glory and am able to take that deep sigh of gratitude. He reveals Himself in the most unexpected places and in the most unexpected ways! And always…

To God be the Glory!

Lynn