Catharsis

This blogging habit has been very cathartic for me in the short few weeks I've played the game. For most of my adult life I have felt a pent-up energy that needed to be expressed, but I can't draw or paint, am too old and fat to dance and have never mastered an instrument. I love to write and have been struck of late by how many different friends and relatives have encouraged me in this direction through one comment or another. This blog is a neat and tidy bundle of my thoughts; it is far more productive and effective for the purpose than the half-dozen prayer and devotion journals that I've started and scattered around the house.

In searching, scanning and reading other blogs, it seems that a fair number eventually have a post in which the author justifies the time and energy spent on what could very easily be a vain pursuit. Now mine will be no exception. At the risk of seeming irrational, sappy and self-centered, here it goes...

In the last days of 2005, I faced a personal first; we had lost our second baby that year, and I was to have a d & c with general anethesia. Save a tooth extraction in my teen years, I have never been "under." Here's the irrational part: I was almost as sure as I'm sitting here, that that night was going to be my last. I knew I needed the surgery, but I also just knew that something unexpected and rare was going to happen during the proceedure and that I would not be coming home.

Despite an early bedtime in anticipation of a 5 a.m. departure, the dreaded thought kept me up until long after midnight when I at last bundled up in my warm robe and headed downstairs to the computer to write my good-byes to my girls. I wrote a short paragraph to each girl, telling them how much I loved them, and why. It was a sad but calming exercise and once I tucked the letter safely away in a drawer to be found another day, the Lord gave me sleep.

Obviously, I did come home.

I thank God though, that through this experience I believe He showed me that I'm not prepared to leave this place; not because I don't want to be with Him, or even because I don't trust He could best and better take care of my girls if He saw fit -- but because I haven't written it down. My testimony of how incredibly God has cared for me is floating out there in the memories of a few friends and relations, but it's not easily available to the people I want most to know it: my children, my parents, my husband and yes -- even myself.