Love wins

There's just no understanding loss, or how it will affect you.  Life is full of winning and losing, making choices and taking responsibility, living life together and alone.

I'm a fairly cautious person.  I like things that are reliable and stable.  That works for some things. Unfortunately, not for things that involve people.  People are the "wild card" in our lives.  For the most part, you can't train them.  You can't force them to stay with you.  Or make them love you.  Or trust them to never hurt you.

My family is suffering the loss of someone we love.  No one died.  She just chose to move on.  There was no warning.  No precipitous fight or obvious breakdown of relationship.  Just blind-sided.

I feel lost.

I feel the loss of her as though she were my own child.  I'm lost as to how to process these feelings. I'm lost as a parent.  How do I help my child through this?  This is so out of my realm of experience.  I tend to be more of a burn-the-bridge kind of person.  You know the type.  Just cut and run.

But I can't do that this time.

I know she's in pain, too.  Deep down inside.  Perhaps too deep right now for her to even acknowledge. She needs stability and reliability, to know people who love her will stay, even when she tries her hardest to drive them away.

So, here I stand, in the middle of all the insults being hurled at me, trying to keep being an adult.  Trying not to lash out when accusations fly.  Trying to maintain my calm instead of going Rambo on the person causing my child so much pain.

Love wins.  Always.

I'm not talking romantic love.  Genuine love.  The kind that wants better for the other person.  The kind that looks beyond the hurt to see the pain.  The kind that makes all efforts to understand what is going on on the inside, and not judge by outward actions.   That kind of love WILL win.

It has to.

Where are the words?

Have you ever felt at a complete loss for the words to adequately describe how you feel?  Verbally, this happens to me often; it's pretty unusual when I write.  Yet, that is where I find myself.

Lately it's been easy to focus on trying to sell this house or my ever-increasing health problems.  If I allowed myself to be, I could easily be totally engrossed with it and quickly lose sight of what is important around me.  That's really not where I want to be.

I've known my husband for more than 25 years.  (Where does the time go?)  I met him at a time when I was very wounded, damaged and needing a friend.  Though he wasn't what I expected, he was exactly what I needed and refused to be driven away.

We've weathered more than our share of storms.  Some were due to our own stupidity, some we suffered at the hand of others, but we weren't crushed and couldn't be driven apart.  We never fell out of love at the same time.  That's no small miracle!

After so many years it's easy to just fall into a routine, to take eachother for granted.  One of my goals for this year is to let those I love know I love them.  This is where the loss of words comes into play.  My heart is full.  Bursting!  But I am clueless to express it.

My husband is a man of God, a loving father and gentle husband.  He cares for me with a tenderness that overwhelms me, that I don't deserve.  I love him with every fiber of being.  That sounds so hollow, but nothing rings more true.