Fall Sorrows

Yes, the leaves are turning - all shades of brilliant yellow and orange and red, fading to brown, fading to dead.  Fall brings heavy sorrows, funerals, waiting for funerals, and reminders of oh so many, too many funerals, standing at gravesites for the past two years.  And I am tired.  Oh, so tired.  Too many funerals, too many gravesites, too much loss.

And yet, I look up, and there are stars.  Too many to count.  Is this the blessing in the midst of all?  The grace only seen in the shadow of tragedy?  I don't know.  I just feel sad.  I just feel loss.  Yet, is there the shine of grace upon it all?  The grace shows only when you look for it.  The grace of my mother calling me to say good bye - without either one of us knowing it..... the grace of a body imprisoned being set free....the grace of....sometimes I don't know.

I am trying to be thankful - thankful before the miracle, thankful precedes the miracle, thankful in the everyday, thankful in the blessing of the small grace. But tonight it eludes me, and the loss and the pain eclipse the thankful.  Yet, I do understand - thanks precedes all - I want to feel it, but in the absence of that, I will DO it.  Thank you God, for life, for friends, for mothers, for aunts, for uncles, for godfathers, for friends.  I will miss them all.  But thank you for having a time with them, thank you for sharing them with me, thank you for allowing them into my life - for they and their influence will never leave me and leave me a fuller existence for having had them in my life.  I do entrust them into your loving care and thank you that I will be with them again one day - a day of rejoicing and reunion in glory.

I still cry - but thank you.