Shanspirations

My husband and I have been having a lively discussion about Harriet the Spy. (see last post) Since my last post, I have read this childhood favorite of mine for the first time since I was in 5th grade. I enjoyed it very much, but now I could see the negative side of the book as well. I could see that if you were already feeling distant from your parents as a child, this book might encourage disrespect and further distance.

Yet I found the book so perceptive of the emotional needs of children and of the ways they may cope. I have been reading Amazon reviews of the book with interest and, admidst many very positive reviews, came across this one:

17 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

Serious worldview problems amidst good writing, December 2, 2003

By A Customer

I just finished listening to this book with our two sons age 8 and 9. The writing style was very descriptive and well developed (with the exception of the conclusion), however the book overall has serious problems in approach. Harriet is a mean-spirited little girl who sees very little in reality of consequences. She sees the negative in most everything and when caught in this trap of jaundiced eye (and pen), rather than being held accountable for her acts and brought to better resolution, she is allowed to go on getting meaner and meaner. The other children respond also meanly. The portrayal of others is very derogatory. We spent many sessions discussing what was wrong with Harriets positions and perspectives as we went through the book. She is compulsive and obsessive and is in serious grief over the loss of her nurse. These issues were completely glossed over. Her mother and father are rather disassociated with her life and caught up in their own lives to her detriment. Raising good kids takes good input and parenting. That does not get portrayed in this book. The conclusion of the book is not well executed and the portrayal of family life is very negative. If you want a book that will rob your kids of their childhood perspective, this is it. If you want a book that is more an adult study in disfunctional children in a disfunctional world populated by disfunctional adults, this is it. After reading this book, it is obvious to me why the 60s and 70s became a child-rearing society that created the greed, personal lack of accountability, and negativism in the young adults of the 80s, 90s, and new century. Values do matter and are shaped heavily in this age range of readers. Reading other reviews on Amazon, by people who claim this book brought them encouragement to become writers, shows to me why todays literature is so devoid of values, hope, and goodness.

When I shared the above review with my husband, he said, “Yes! That’s exactly how I felt after reading Harriet the Spy as a kid. And when people say Harriet was their inspiration to write, I think ‘if that’s what inspires you to write, you shouldn’t be allowed ever to touch a pen!’

It’s funny the differing perspectives my husband and I have. I still really like the book and I still really, really like him:) And the book did inspire me to write.

But the review above does a good job of capturing the other side of what I feel about “Harriet.” The truth is that there is mostly an ungodly perspective coupled with a lot of emotional insight. If the author had been a woman who had true spiritual insight as well as emotional insight, it would have been perfect. As it is, there is only emotional insight and a rather skewed moral view.

But the reason I still love it? There are things this book captures that no other book I’ve ever read does. If I have to wade through some things I don’t like to get there, I’m still very glad this book touched my life.

Lately I have been filling pages and pages of my journal whenever I get the chance. Over the years the pace of my writing has ebbed and flowed, but I have been journaling ever since as a 5th grader I read Harriet the Spy. This book is one my husband also read as a child—and disliked. I could see why he might. Harriet wants to become a writer and is told she should keep a notebook of interesting things that happen so she can learn to write (or something like that).

What she actually does is spy on her classmates and people she knows, even actually watching outside their houses. She writes everything she thinks and much of it is critical or negative, yet she is truly curious about other people. At some point her classmates steal her notebook and discover all the unkind things she has written about them. She has no friends and is utterly isolated. She learns a thing or two through this, though it is hard now for me to remember exactly what.

I came away from this book inspired to write my own journals. I didn’t ever once think of spying on other people, filling my journal with negative things, or becoming eccentric as Harriet did. None of that held the appeal—rather, I think it was the power writing had. There was magic in Harriet’s words, despite how off-base she was, for her writings revealed that fascinating stories hide in the everyday. Writing was a way to discover the stories. And I knew even then that my life as a child was something I wanted to remember when I grew up. So writing could not only discover stories, but preserve them.

How comforting writing was for Harriet and what an obsession it became for her. If something can become an obsession for one person, it may be simply very enjoyable for someone else who is less obsession-prone. For me that’s what writing became—very enjoyable. It still is. Now there are new wonders I find in it that I did not know as a child. I didn’t know then how much self-discovery I’d accomplish in keeping a journal. Was I a simpler person with less to discover then—or, perhaps, still fairly complicated, but only less experienced at figuring out how things work?

One of the great wonders of writing involves memory. I didn’t know my memory wouldn’t be quite as good once I became an adult. Sometimes when I write details of my week that I have found unforgettable, it’s hard to believe I will come back only two weeks later and already have forgotten so much that if I hadn’t written, I wouldn’t know how an interesting story unfolded. But I do. It happens all the time. I love it that rather than forgetting, I can trace details of how big changes in my life are happening.

Often the intricate details that make life fascinating are too intimate to share with other people.  If I do share them, I only share select details with select people.  No one ever knows the full scope of the life story I am living but me. This makes my journal important.  If I don’t write I’ll lose so much.

I am forever seeing my life—even while it happens—as Story. Sometimes when I am miserable with suspense over something I’m waiting to see happen—perhaps a new place to live, an answer for a health problem, or the positive pregnancy test I’ve been longing for years to see—I step outside of my frustration and imagine I’m a reader or listener of my story.

Isn’t it so much easier to handle suspense when you read a story than when you live one? As the person living the story, you hate painful circumstances very much and you don’t know what will happen, so it’s easy to lose heart. As a reader of the story, you know things may be bad now, but often it only adds to the excitement of reading forward to see what will happen next.

So I realize that if I keep on writing, I’ll have a story bit by bit to enjoy as the months and years come. The pain of the hard times will fall away and I’ll be left with pure story. I’ve seen many elderly people who can look back at their once difficult life and say with joy, “I had a good life.” They have a new perspective they didn’t always have, similar to that a reader has at the end of a good book.

As for Harriet the Spy, I wish I could remember more fully how a character like Harriet, who had ever so many faults and who wasn’t even someone I wanted to emulate, changed the course of my life all the way to today. Most of the book I cannot remember. I have ordered and plan to read it again for the first time since I was a 5th grader. This is a way of going back to that time in my life and reading part of my own story fresh. We can read many books, but only one story is truly ours to live. Yet some special books can become part of our own real story as Harriet the Spy did for me.

Anna had become fascinated with a little book called, “Go, Dog, Go.” It was silly, it was funny. It had lines like:

Stop, dogs, stop!

The light is red.

Go, dogs, go!

It’s green ahead.

She liked to read it a lot and her daddy had been reading it to her before bed nightly.

Now we were on our way home from church and my husband was driving. I wasn’t expecting what happened next. One of those moments came when the driver misjudges whether to hurl through the yellow light before it turns red or stop instead.

He decide to stop and stop we did. We stopped so suddenly, my neck lurched forward and when we came to rest, I was rubbing my aching neck. My husband looked at me. He knows that my whole life of back and neck pain started with a whiplash accident in highschool.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said.

“I know.”

Turning to Anna, “Are you okay,” I asked. She said yes.

Jacob said he hadn’t thought he had time to get through the light before it changed red. “I’m sorry about your neck,” he said.

“I know, Sweetie.”

In the middle of this solemn atmosphere, Anna piped up from the back seat, sounding equally serious.

“Oh, Daddy, I should have brought my “Go, Dogs, Go” book for you. That would have helped you know when to go.”

Jacob started laughing, a deep hearty laugh. I joined in and Anna, not knowing what was funny, laughed too because we were laughing. My neck recovered. We were still laughing.

It still makes me chuckle now.

There are so many conversations when you have a three year old. Not all of them are funny, but quite a few of them are interesting. I write down (in Anna’s journal) the conversations that amuse me or stand out.

—-

In the Kitchen in the Morning with Mommy

“You know what?” said Anna. “I like my daddy.”

“I know you do,” said Mommy.

“When he gets dressed up,” said Anna, “I think he’s a handsome daddy.”

—-

With Daddy in the Kitchen Another Morning

“Daddy, I didn’t have any dreams last night.”

“Oh?” said Daddy.

“I used them all up, so I can’t have any more.”

“What will you do?”

“I just won’t have any more dreams!” said Anna.

“How tragic,” said Daddy.

____

On the Way Home from Grandma’s in Tennessee:

“I miss Grandma Phillips,” said Anna. “I don’t like to go away from Grandma Phillips. That makes it really lonely for me.”

—-

At Mealtime

“Just a minute,” said Mommy as she was eating her dinner and Anna asked for something.

Anna said, “When you say ‘just a minute,’ it says ‘just a couple hours!”

Mommy burst out laughing. She did not expect that comment.

—-

Reading the Bible Together

Anna and Momma were sitting at the kitchen counter reading aloud the story of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41:1-8. When they got to verse 8 where it says that Pharaoh’s spirit was troubled and he sent for all the magicians of Egypt to interpret his dream, Anna stopped Momma to give an interpretation of what was really happening in this story.

Anna said, “He was ‘tubbled’ and he was sad, so he said, ‘Mommy, I want you to hug me.’ ”

“He said that?” said Momma.

“Yes, the Pharaoh called Mommy and said ‘Mommy, I love you. Please hug me.’”

Momma grinned at Anna and they finished reading the passage. Then Momma picked up Anna’s journal and immediately wrote down Anna’s interpretation of just what happened when Pharaoh had a bad dream!

This next September when we celebrate our 6th anniversary it will be two years since the advent of the mysterious mites. Arriving at a time when we were very happy, within a week, these bugs had caused all normal life as we knew it to stop. We endured 2 and a half months of intense physical misery.

And yet I can say we are happy again now. Supremely blessed because we know how good we have it. We know something many people don’t. We fathom how wonderful it is to be in our home without incessant painful bites. We know freedom from that misery is worth more than any expensive upholstery or fineries. Just to feel good in one’s body is a luxury and a delight.

But there are days when it bothers me that I won’t be the same again. I can’t imagine the world as I did before and I lost a naivety I enjoyed. I knew that life was hard and the world held cancer and war and poverty. But I didn’t know there were creatures I couldn’t see waiting somewhere for me to stumble over one day. If there was anything I didn’t worry about, it was that! I didn’t know something so far down on my list of the world’s woes as to be unthought of could shake me so.

Many times I’ve wished I could go back in time and stop our visit to the second-hand shop in Saratoga. I’ve imagined how different everything would have been if we hadn’t caught them that day. And then…I stop. What if life wouldn’t have been as good? I’ve learned so much endurance and patience. I have more compassion. God chose this story to be mine. I don’t want to give up the additional wisdom I’ve gained.

But I also don’t want anybody to know about it. I never tell anyone (who doesn’t already know) about the mites. I don’t like to be some kind of mite expert. I’m passionate about sleep research, about faith and memory-keeping, about being a wife and momma—but not mites. Never that.

Still I have more hits because of biting mites than for anything else I’ve ever posted. I began my blog wanting to write of things I love, but became known instead for something I don’t even like to remember. Many times I’ve considered deleting every post about mites. A fresh clean blog as though this had never happened sounds wonderful.

But I couldn’t do it. Other people are hurting as we once were. And I have some help to offer. If our story only benefits a few, it is worth it.

For a long time I left the old posts intact and stopped writing many new posts. After all, if I didn’t want to talk about what we’d been through, there was no way I’d be giving out my blog address to anyone new. And since it seemed as though the topic of mites had taken over, I no longer wanted my loved ones to visit the blog. So there was nobody to write for.

I want to start over. And to do that, I need to say goodbye to the mysterious bugs. I’ll leave the most relevant posts, but I’d like to wrap up the topic with a summary of what happened to us and where to find the most useful posts.

If you’re new to the blog and came because of a biting bug problem, this will make finding things easier for you. Read the overview and you’ll know the basics of what happened to us. Go to the recommended posts and find what worked for us.  

However, keep in mind one caveat: Don’t trust what worked for me to be best for you without doing your own research.  I am a girl who likes to eat organic. I like nature. I hate having polluted rivers. I do not like pesticides on my food and certainly not in my house! So I wish that our solution hadn’t involved pesticides or anything that wasn’t natural. But it did.

Maybe you can find something better. If so, feel free to comment here and let others know. What people in this predicament most love reading is other’s success stories because it gives hope. But as far as my own advice goes, I can’t guarantee that everything is safe.  I think it is, but what if I’m wrong?  Please use wisdom and discretion and do your own research on the things we suggest. 

Overview:

In September ‘06 my husband and I unknowingly picked up a mysterious biting bug after I’d tried on old coats at a second-hand shop while on a trip celebrating our anniversary. We started feeling itchy, creepy-crawling sensations on our skin the next day (though, of course, we had showered). We couldn’t imagine what it was. Within a few days, we started getting mild, stinging bites.  Within another day things had gotten much worse—we were now getting sharp, hard bites that made us wince—and they came more and more frequently. Soon the bites were happening all day and all night. The nights were worst and we could barely sleep.

The obvious things we thought would help—showers, baths, washing our bedding and clothes—were useless. Nothing helped. An exterminator came and said that these were not bed bugs, which had been our first suspicion. He did not know what they were (later he treated for us, but the treatment did not work).

I began desperately researching solutions and praying—no begging—God for an answer. But no answer came and as the weeks and months stretched on, life became unbearable. We tried thing after thing to no avail. I found my faith severely tried and I ached with feeling as though God had left me alone.  Yet I determined to praise Him and even thank Him for using this hard thing in our lives for good. I examined my life to see what He wanted to teach me and what He wanted me to change.

Gradually hope began to come.  One day I got the idea that God was going to give us an answer that would help many other people.  As I had been reading on the internet, I had been frustrated that no one had a step by step method for getting through this (there’s more available now, but then it seemed there was nothing but pieces).  And then there were the ebooks. They promised help if you simply paid the author money.  I bought one and then another and I only found tidbits of help, nothing substantial.  I was so mad that these people were selling their answers instead of offering them freely.  That was when I decided that if God gave us an answer I wouldn’t hide it or sell it, but openly share it.  I was excited that maybe God was going to give a breakthrough that we could use to bless others.

We had times when our hopes rose and crashed. One night as I prayed, I began to cry, pouring out my heart to God. I cried and cried to Him, “Why are you leaving me alone? You could help, but You’re not. I cling to You no matter what, I cry only to You, please, oh, please won’t you help me?” It seemed I spent hours on my knees pleading with God, repenting of every wrong I could see in my life. I felt utterly broken.

Somewhere in that came a new hope. I believed He was going to answer. And He did. We begin finding the missing pieces that made everything else work. By the middle of December, we were well on our way to being free. By the end of December, we knew we were coming out of this. In early January we had a setback and got discouraged.  We wondered why the itchiness continued long after the bites finally stopped.  But gradually things kept improving.  The worst of our ordeal—though it seemed like years—had really lasted only 3 months. Our lives—so drastically altered—came back to normal again. And we’ve never gone back.

Here is what worked for us:

Help! I’m Being Bit By Something I Can’t See! What do I do?

This is the post my husband wrote to give a logical progression what to do, step by step.  I was proud of him for making it all clearer than I could have done.  This is the plan that we came up with ourselves, putting together all that we had learned, and this is what worked for us.  If you only read one post, this should be it.

Other General Tips:

- You can read all the posts on this topic by clicking here.  To read chronologically, click on “previous” at the bottom of the page and go back as far as you can to the beginning. Go post by post. This has the advantage of allowing you to see if your symptoms are even the same as ours.  If you have bedbugs or something else, this may not be the right system for you and you’ll realize this sooner.

-In the comments under this post, a woman named Laura asked me some detailed questions as her family experienced biting bugs.  I answered in great detail and mentioned things I haven’t mentioned elsewhere—like the fact that we had stopped using our couch—and maybe this will be of aid to you and fill in gaps I’ve left elsewhere (it really is hard to think of everything!).

-I can’t emphasize enough that if you want to learn more details, many of them are embedded in the comments under the posts. As I learned things along the way, I often added them as comments rather than making new posts (sometimes I shared a better place to purchase a product online, etc). This makes it very tricky to wade through everything and many times people write asking me questions that are already addressed in the comments if they would persist in reading. I encourage you to read everything before you ask questions. I want to be a help, but I get worn out thinking about mites.

(One way to simplify is to open a Word document and cut and past all your favorite comment tips into it.  Print it out and highlight and number things according to which you’d like to try first!)

Other people have also left comments telling what worked for them. Several things people suggested helped me greatly; others I never tried because I was all better by the time someone made the suggestion. Maybe they will work for you.  Some of the ideas seem very good, some I’m not sure of, but I’ve kept them all there so that you can decide for yourself. 

The last and very important thing I have to say is that, though we live in a culture that makes hell seem like a joke (or something that misguided ministers used to love going on and on about), going through something like this can make you certain that when the Bible says things can get really bad, there’s no exaggeration there.  How can we look at all the pain in the world and delude ourselves into thinking that God shies away from ever allowing (or bringing) pain?  When He says there’s a hell, I believe it (Luke 16:19-30).  I wish it weren’t true, but I must trust Him.

This trial is nothing compared to spending eternity in misery in hell away from God.  How I long for people to take their relationship with God seriously.  Could Christ Jesus really be the Son of God though many religions teach He is not?  What would it mean if He were? You need to know.  May it be your wake up call if you don’t know Him that you really need to know Him.  You need this more than food and water and being comfortable in your own skin.  You really, really need Him.  I believe He wants you to know that.

Here are some links to where you can read the Bible, listen to the Bible (I love this one), or download the Bible.

I think I would have been passionately interested in this subject, How Not to Get Sick, for much of my life if I had even known it was possible to avoid getting sick. But I grew up thinking there was little or nothing one could do to avoid getting a cold or flu. There were many times in my life when all winter long I seemed to go from one sickness to another.

It started in childhood with constant ear infections and sicknesses pestered me all through high school, college, and early work-world days. It was only after I married when one winter my doctor had diagnosed me with beginning pneumonia after I’d been sick for months straight that I stopped and wondered, “What can I do to keep myself well?”

I had been given inhalers to help me through my pneumonia, but it took weeks, even months, to gradually get better. I suppose it is my lot in life to have to battle “bugs” or some sort or another, perhaps I have a weak immune system, but I wondered if I had any choice in the matter at all. Could eating healthy make a difference?

That was where I started, but I am by no means a health nut, and so I was thrilled when in the next year a simple article that I came across in a magazine (shared with me by someone I knew), showed me that stopping a sickness in it’s tracks could be much more basic than even a healthy diet and could often work with or without a healthy diet, in fact. The next time I started to get sick, I tried a garlic and apple cider vinegar method suggested in the article, and to my amazement, it worked!

I’m an amateur when it comes to using herbs and natural remedies. You can find experts who know far, far more than I do. Yet if a few simple things can have helped me so much that I went from being sick about ten times a year to only one or two, then maybe this can help others, too.

Here are things I do at the first sign of a sickness (and for me and for several others to whom I’ve recommended them, they work most of the time as long as they are begun immediately):

1) If I’m not going anywhere for the rest of the day and it won’t matter if I have bad breath, I start with a clove of raw garlic. The original method I learned was to pour warm water over crushed garlic clove into a container, add honey, and raw apple cider vinegar, and drink the resulting liquid. This worked well, but I found I was often too impatient to take the time to heat water and make this up. So I tried putting a raw garlic clove in my mouth and chewing it rapidly. Then I swallowed some water to which I’d added a tablespoon of raw apple cider vinegar and spoonful of raw honey. I thought this worked equally well, and though less pleasant, it’s faster.

2) If I can’t afford to have garlic breath, then I use raw apple cider vinegar (ACV) and water, gargling the drink and coating my throat with it. I rinse my mouth afterwards since ACV is harsh on teeth and take a spoonful of active manuka honey, also coating my throat and allowing it to slowly dissolve.

3) Next I take a dropperful of Echinacea-Goldenseal tincture which I purchase at my local health store (you could, alternatively, purchase bulk herbs, and learn to make this tincture yourself.) The key to the herb Echinacea’s effectiveness is catching a sickness early and being very regular about your doses. So you need to take a dropperful or so many times spaced throughout the day and right before bed until all your symptoms have gone away and usually a few days past that.

4) I also immediately steep a homemade blend of herbal tea that I make using “activating herbs” (herbs known to increase the immune system’s response to sickness). To make this less complicated for others, I won’t give all the herbs I use in my tea. You can make something just as effective or nearly so by going to the store and buying a tea by Traditional Medicinals called Organic Echinacea Plus. I’ve also experimented with two of their other teas: Organic Lemon Echinacea Throat Coat and Herba Tussin. I think they all help, but my favorite is the Echinacea Plus. I drink it throughout the day until the sore throat or whatever early symptoms I was experiencing are entirely gone.

5) If I think I am coming down with a stomach upset/flu, I take a slightly different approach. I add a ginger recipe I discovered on another site. Having used this on both my husband and child with good results, I really like this recipe. I also love the thermos idea which I adopted from this recipe and have been using to make my teas ever since.

There are many more things you can do to stop a cold or flu from developing further. As I’ve seen how effective these simple solutions (above) can be, I keep wanting to learn more and I dabble with different combinations of herbs just for the fun of having a variety of things to depend on. But the truth is that you can do a lot with a little. As someone with, perhaps, a weaker than usual immune system, I imagine that if this works for me, it will work even better for you! These remedies always work better for my husband and daughter than they do for me. I just have to take a bit more and be more consistent than they do to get the results. But I do get results. I usually stay well! The key really is starting immediately before symptoms get bad. I hope this helps someone out there who grew up as unknowing as I did about the real effects of using herbal remedies to treat minor sicknesses at home.

Note: for infants who are breastfeeding, there is usually no need to give them anything directly because the nursing mom can take these remedies herself and pass them on to her child via the milk. When a child is over one year old (no honey for children under one year!), but under two years, I probably wouldn’t give them anything but garlic and honey mixed together on a spoon. Maybe some parents wouldn’t be able to get their child to eat a spoonful of honeyed garlic, but we had no trouble. Since we didn’t give our daughter sugar, she loved honey so much at that age that she didn’t care a bit if we tucked a crushed garlic clove into it:)

I also thought I’d add that I love this basic quick list of remedies for those with children and have used many of these ideas. For a long time I had it posted on my fridge for easy reference. I so appreciate the folks at the Bulk Herb Store and No Greater Joy Magazine for sharing so much about their personal use of herbal remedies. I was so ignorant of these things when I first came across their information and they provided such down-to-earth help that I felt confident trying basic time-tested remedies myself. They really are the ones who got me started, and in doing so, they have brought me so much benefit!

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A friend at church has been diagnosed with ALS and has been losing her health very rapidly. Since there is no cure for ALS, I can’t do the pretending I want to do that she is going to get better. I find myself remembering someone else who had Lou Gehrig’s Disease (as it is often called), someone I never would have met if she hadn’t had ALS.

Audrey, who made a great impression on me one summer between college semesters when I cared for her 40 hours a week, is still the one I think of every time I see a Chickadee (her favorite bird, which she introduced to me:).

I think of her also when I see a reference to the Anne of Green Gables videos which we watched laughing and crying together that summer on a series of bright sunny days. In the part where Matthew died, we looked at each other, tears in our eyes, and she knew I was thinking of her. But those were joyful days and I still remember friendship and sparkling sunlight shinining on Audrey and me and the big picture window with the chickadees in the feeder outside.

Sometimes in my memory I am sitting by her bedside in the darkness after she has gone to sleep and her snore is soft and cadent. In her last months with ALS, she knows she is going to die. And I know it, too. But it seems so unreal. In the night, eternity seems to swirl before my heart as I listen to her sleep and as I wait.

On some nights she asked me to sing to her before she went to bed. Other nights I read to her from the psalms. And if she asked me to (and I always hoped she would) I prayed for her aloud before she went to sleep. Sometimes we had discussions in the process of the evening’s care.

Like when I asked her if she was afraid of dying.

She had told me before once with bright wet eyes that though I couldn’t know because I’d only met her that summer, she had been a bad person, harsh and abusive with her children when they were growing up. And I knew that one of her daughters had never been able to forgive her.

I had watched Audrey working through acknowlegdment of her sins and wrongs, the process of talking to God in her heart about everything. She had been afraid; I had seen it in her eyes night after night. And so many times I had mentioned God—His forgiveness, His hope, which I could not even say how deeply I wanted her to know.

But this time when we talked of death, to my surprise and joy, she said, “No. I’m not afraid anymore. I know God has forgiven me for my sins. After all, He even sent His Son to die…He has forgiven me.”

I think back to that moment with Joy and with Wishing: the Joy is that hope sparkled in her heart at last and I was so glad, but the Wishing is that if only she had asked her children’s forgiveness, it would have made the process of healing for them more complete. But maybe she was afraid to. She never did tell them.

It is funny how people who are dying, as they gaze more and more toward the coming world, can lose sight of what they could do to aliviate sadness for those who remain in this one.

I saw something similar at the death bed of my own grandma, years later. She had been a loving woman and did not have the sort of regrets Audrey had expressed. But there was pain that she might have mended, loving assurances and kind words she might have spoken, healing she could have brought. So much she might have given to her children and grandchildren with some well-choosen words, yet she was not aware of that. Her focus was on the transition she was about to make. Traveling out of this world into an unknown one is no thing to take lightly.

I knew it seemed selfish of me to wish she would focus on on her family when she had before her a trip that none of us had ever taken. But I still think with longing of all the things I wish she might have said, the precious goodbye conversation I would have wanted before she went.

Back when Audrey was dying I wished I might have explained to Audrey how important it was to tell her grown children the repentence she felt in her heart, the regrets, the unspoken love she’d missed giving them all the years. But there is something that keeps us from mentioning something so personal to a dying person. We hold our tongues. We know it isn’t the right time to speak. Yet the right time never comes.

And after the final goodbye is over lingers the thought, “Why couldn’t I have ever said what was on my heart?” Why didn’t the right time ever come? It would only have taken a moment then, but now another moment with her can never ever come.

Perhaps it is pride and selfishness that never dies as long as we are living. There is a family member I wish I could talk to and ask to forgive me for things I said when I was a teenager. But I never do because there is so much I believe he should ask me to forgive him for, too, and he never will, and so I cannot bear to humble myself to say I was wrong when he was so much more wrong than I. I always hope that all is forgetten anyways, but if I haven’t forgotten, is it really likely that he has? Perhaps a better time will come; maybe someday I will gain courage to do it. Or I will learn to live with it.

But I think of my friend at church, and of Grandma, and of Audrey—they remind me that life often doesn’t unfold the way we plan and that goodbyes come quicker than we expect. If my family member died before I expected and I never got my chance to say I’m sorry, what would I feel? Because the regrets linger forever and the moment to speak and heal never comes again. We must do our living now.

And sometimes that living comes by dying. In dying to pride and selfishness now, we feel a small pain and the great large fear of it hurts most of all. But we close what might have been a deep healless gash open through endless time; we open and step into a new bright corridor like my Anne of Green Gables days with Audrey in the sparkling summer.

I just wanted to share something that encouraged me today. To see the whole post, visit Valerie’s blog, Life’s Good.

The thing about transition is, that it is painful. It is that transient time between conflict and resolution, that point of no-return, that time when it seems we are caught in a vortex, and being drawn inexorably to some conclusion or other. God does not leave us in that time. He allows us to experience the pain, the confusion, the sense of doubt, that He may work something of Himself into our hearts. He allows us to undergo turmoil for our greater good. If we let Him do the deep work in us, oh, how beautiful the fragrance of Him that exudes from our spirits.

The thing is, if we resist, as I SO want to do, we will just come round the mountain again, some other way, through some other circumstance. He desires to do a good work in us to completion, and He cares more about the outcome than the process, though He bore our pain, carried our sorrows on the Cross. I believe He grieves when we are grieving, but He can see the manifest blessing, the splendid work that is done in our hearts through the journey of pain.