Challenges and Blessings ...

I stumbled upon a new blog this weekend - it is on my sidebar. If you ever need a kick in the pants after a self-pity party, just click over on NieNie. She'll put it all in perspective. I was up until the wee hours of the morning reading her blog. I needed to see when it all changed for her, the moment she started to categorize her life into "before" and "after". There is a single picture that, once you know the story, captures both the essence of the loss and the joy of her journey to a new being - Easter Morning, 2008. I stared at that picture for quite some time, both before and after I had learned of her struggle, her suffering, her need to reinvent herself and yet cling to what made her herself before the accident. There is a prophetic air to her writing in the months before the accident, an alluding to fear, a sense of almost knowing this all must come tumbling down, it is too perfect, too blissful. Before Emma was born, I would marvel at the people I had either met or read about who seemed to be blessed by the struggles in their lives. Children who challenged them with their disabilities, disease that had ravaged their bodies and left them without much hope of a future, catastrophic events caused by the carelessness of others that devastated their families or their homes or their livelihoods - all horrible circumstances that one would think would cause a sense of despair to set in, a sense of pointlessness, a sense of, "I just cannot go on". And I would wonder at the absence of that, and at the joy that seemed to define their lives. I would fear the same things happening to me, to my family, most especially, to my children - because I doubted my own courage, my own abilities to cope, my own strength and faith. I am not out of the darkness yet, so I can not judge how I have weathered this storm in my life. But I have come to realize that there is a sense of being chosen that comes with struggles of these proportions. As though, God looks down at each of us and judges us to be strong enough to handle the gifts of the special circumstances we have been presented. And we call upon ourselves to meet the challenge, be worthy of the gift. Because that is what has come out of my challenge - a sense of wanting to be worthy of Emma, of all she has been through, of all that has been done to hopefully bring her home to us. There is also as an appreciation of all the normalcy that marked our lives before, and a desire to renew that in the aftermath of the turmoil that has marked it since. When you read NieNie's story, you will marvel at her faith, her strength, her willingness to go on. She speaks of the blessings in her life, and of her simple thankfulness at being alive. Hers is perhaps the most inspirational story I have read in a very long time - well, except, of course, for my little angel. But I am a bit biased.