by Sharon O | Feb 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
The word prompt for the day is another easy one that fits right into our ‘week’ very well.
The word chosen is ‘Morning.’
Tomorrow morning we will get up and get ready to go to one more memorial service for one more friend who passed away.
It can be termed as MOURNING in the Morning.
Yes, same word two different spellings and two different meanings.
It is very sad to think that she is gone. No longer here, but in Heaven now.
I remember our conversations, our prayers for each other and our emails.
She left too soon. Born in 1960 and leaving in 2016.
God does know when we begin life and when we end it, but it seems so soon.
I have to trust that for some reason God wanted her to leave this place and move to a quieter more pleasant ‘scene’.
It is ok we can miss her from down here and we can wonder what it would have been like to have her stay.
Perhaps the best ‘peaceful place,’ is in heaven considering her struggle for the last four years.
Tomorrow morning we will drive to a church, sit in a pew bench, sing a few songs and remember, mourning is just for a short time.
Good bye my friend. I will miss you.
by Sharon O | Feb 24, 2016 | Uncategorized
I am tired and very weary of saying good bye and going to memorial services, for those who we know passing from us in un-expected ways, leaving us shocked or surprised and deeply saddened.
This Saturday we have a memorial service for our friend. She was beautiful, gifted, sweet and gentle.
I will miss her. When I heard she was on her death bed I was torn between going to visit and not.
Usually when one is on hospice, time is limited, and I had heard she was thin and gaunt looking and did I want to remember her that way?
I think not.
I remember her as a strong survivor who was courageous and brave.
I remember her as someone with deep faith and a warm spirit.
I remember sending messages via email to her and we would chat and talk and share, then she was not there.
The email address not available anymore.
I worried, I prayed. I fretted and wondered. Then I heard she was sicker, much sicker.
Cancer is a thief stealing from us those who we care for and wish to spend time with.
She fought hard and tried desperately to live in such a way as to find strength and stamina.
I wished to see her, but also respected the time she had with her family when someone is passing from this life to the next, it is a sacred time almost a holy place in time for remembering, for family and close intimate friends.
We were friends but I was not sure if it qualified me to ‘visit’ her in such a fragile condition.
Oh we knew her for over 15 years, but how comfortable would it be, to visit and observe, when she was dying.
It was a hard struggle for me to know what to do.
She was a daughter who loved her family, she was a kind and gentle person.
This Saturday we will walk into a church, listen to the words spoken and music sung and say good bye to one more, who left too early.
Then next Saturday we will go to another memorial service for an older person, who lived her life well and was ready to leave.
Each service will be a sad reminder that someday, we all will be ‘the one’ others will be coming for and I wonder, when it comes to be our time,
I pray and I hope we will leave a legacy that others will remember for many years after.
A good and positive legacy, of life, and love and hope and faith shared.
I will always remember our friend. Her beauty, her faith, her courageous smile.
She was beautiful.
by Sharon O | Feb 16, 2016 | Uncategorized
I didn’t get to the word prompt last Friday as I was focusing on the Valentine theme week, so today I am sharing the word prompt.
The word they chose is: Limit
An easy word I think, we often get to the end of our ’emotional, or physical road’ and sense there is a limit to what we can or cannot do.
I certainly am noticing many things in the last year that has changed for me.
Stairs are not as easy to climb, I cannot lift heavy objects as easy.
There is a Limit to my tolerance for rude people or behavior. I used to be able to ignore them, now I want to express my opinion.
Life is too short for rudeness or disrespect from others. I set a limit on those kinds of people in my life.
As we move towards our retirement money will be set to a Limit. It will not be as easy to spend knowing that ‘this is it’, and the well can get dry.
As we get older we set a Limit on our choice of snacks and wrong foods because as I have learned from reading, we really do become what we consume.
There has to be a Limit of the ‘not so good’ choices and an increase of the good choices.
When our children were little we would take them to the beach or camping and we would set the perimeters around where they could play.
The boundary was placed and they were given limits, or places of confinement for their safety.
The same as when we had our ‘dog’s there were certain limits we gave them, as to where they could go.
Life is full of these kinds of decisions, no matter what age we are, there are rules of limit for us.
It is good. It is safe and peaceful.
God even said that in the garden of Eden when He told Adam and Eve, you can eat everything but NOT from this one tree.
Did they listen? no. Did they get the cause and effect of that bad decision? yes. And we do to when we don’t follow the rules.
It is good to have a limits within our boundary where we can stay safe and secure as we move through life.
by Sharon O | Feb 12, 2016 | Uncategorized
When looking at the Bible there are 686 references to love inside this wonderful book.
That is powerful and obviously it means a lot for us because nothing was put in the word that God did not want.
[Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:5] .
There are commandments and then there are affirmations on the ‘word love’ for us to pay attention to and act upon.
[So be very careful to love the Lord your God. Joshua 23:11]
There are instructions on how to love others, how to love our families and how to even love our selves.
[You, Lord, are forgiving and good, abounding in love to all who call to you. Psalm 86:5]
There are so many wonderful verses to pick and choose from I am not sure where to begin.
I am hoping you understand and follow by now that our God is a wonderful, loving and respectful God.
[But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
Psalm 86:15]
He is always faithful, always waiting, always loving no matter what we do.
[When I said, “My foot is slipping,” your unfailing love, Lord, supported me. Psalm 94:18]
It is comforting to know HE cares always, is never too busy, although that is hard to imagine as He is God.
[ For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.
Psalm 11:5]
He stay with us throughout every generation and every span of time.
[But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children— Psalm 103:17]
Oh I pray we grasp the depth and the width and the wonderful powerful love HE gives us over and over and over.
[For great is your love, higher than the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies. Psalm 108:4]
It is good to remember and give thanks, it is good to remember and feel grateful. It is good to hold onto the promise, HE is not ever leaving.
[Great peace have those who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble. Psalm 119:165]
I pray we all in this time ‘of love’, remember God loves us. US that is You who are reading this, and ME who is writing this. Loves US.
[I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. proverbs 8:17]
[He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8]
[For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16]
There are many more verses I could share with you, I think the point has been made.
God’s love is always, available for us whenever we decide to seek him.
[God looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.
Psalm 53:2]
On this Valentine weekend I pray we remember ‘the one Valentine,’ who gives us peace and hope and joy forever
and loves us with an unconditional love.
by Sharon O | Feb 11, 2016 | Uncategorized
Tonight in a restaurant my husband and I saw an old friend of ours.
It was a bitter sweet moment because he and his wife were good friends of ours.
He was a Pastor, had a small church, a great ‘wife’ who loved him and who also was diagnosed with breast cancer.
No fault of her own. It is just something that came to her.
In time, after a year or two, she had surgery to restore what was lost. Not a lot of chemo. Just a new look.
When you marry one of the vows are ‘for better or for worse’. She saw the worse. Parts of her body ‘removed’ and new parts aligned with the ‘old spaces’ left empty.
There was choice he made to ‘discontinue’ his vow. He lost his marriage, his church and He lost his first love.
He left her alone, without insurance, she was still medically ‘fragile’, he said she was not ‘perfect’, no one is.
It was no fault of her own, the scars spoke of courage, of bravery, of letting something go and replacing it with a healing better place.
He chose. He left her alone. I would encourage her, tell her she was brave. She was beautiful.
So tonight I am struggling with the news he shared. She is in last stage of dying, on hospice. Perhaps tonight.
He complained that family would not let him see her. Then he went to sit down with a lady I didn’t know and eat a meal. Is that right?
Eat a meal with someone who is not ‘your wife’… when she perhaps is dying?
It is not about HIM. NEVER has been.
In first Corinthians a book of the new testament, it says in chapter 13: 13
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
So when someone is dying. Someone you loved at one point in time, is leaving, I miss her already.
Her courage. Her stamina. Her resilience. Her love for HER God.
I have no way of finding out how to find her or see her. She was beautiful, a survivor. A warrior on many fronts.
How should I react? I am sad. She fought hard, then it came back, she fought more and I don’t know the final results. I heard it moved into the bone. The deep and dark and spreading place between morrow and cell giving birth to the wrong cells structure.
Love is NOT conditional. Love is ‘now’, right now.
I am sad for my good friend I know she loves the Lord, but I wish I could hold her hand and tell her ‘you are so beautiful, special and loved.’
Love is a choice. Some choose to not do the very hard.
