Happy Easter

when i reflect on the last year, as one is want to do at birthday time, i’m reminded of how hard it was.  at the time of my birthday i was spending nearly every day at a local rehab center where both my grandmothers were recovering, one from a fall and one from complications due to pneumonia.  neither of them was able to be alone.  my mother’s mother, then 84, was watched over by my mother, my aunt and me.  my father’s mother, then 93, was watched over by my dad, 2 of his sisters and me.  there were times when i was the only one able to be there and i had to run back and forth from room to room.  luckily for me they were on the same floor.  my paternal grandmother was there for 4 weeks and my maternal grandmother there for 6.  in the meantime i was traveling back and forth, 180 miles round trip; to be with my dad’s other sister who was in the last stages of cancer.  she would die before either of my grandmothers’ left the center.  My 93 year old grandmother would not be able to attend her daughter’s funeral.  i was tired and frazzled beyond what i thought was possible.  after surviving 2010 and the bronchitis, the pneumonia, the firing, the flood, the loss of my house, car, my possessions and possibly my life i didn’t think i would ever recover.  i would soon lose a 17 year old dog as well.  i was one big, raw nerve.

when i think of the last 2 years i cannot remember a day that i didn’t feel exhausted, a day when i didn’t feel helpless in some way, a day when i wasn’t terrified of the next catastrophe awaiting me.  i still feel that way, but i am grateful that this birthday was spent in a more peaceful place, every little bit helps.  my life is still in limbo as i await the changes yet to come, the completion of the house, the inevitability of a new job or school, the subsequent plan to escape this anxiety-inducing heap of a house and go somewhere else—anywhere else; a place where i can relax, a place where i can leave the house and not have to see this wretched river that is now my arch-enemy, a place without torturous memories.

so i experienced my birthday as not much more than the marking of time.  one big red “X” on the 37^th year of my life.  then i woke up this morning, Easter—day 2 of my 38^th year—and was reminded that i was to celebrate the best thing to have ever happened in human history:  the resurrection of Jesus.  the thing that makes all that we suffer in this world worth it.  the thing that gives us Christians hope in the painless and tearless Heaven that awaits us.  the thing that proves to me that the pain is not the end of the story but a necessary means to an end that is greater than anything we can imagine in this fallen, sinful world.  praise be to God for being bigger, better, kinder, more merciful and more loving than our human minds can comprehend. 

Happy Easter!

grace and peace