and so she soars on wings like eagles

Today I am trapped in my memory, remembering the woman who inspired me to be myself. After more than 9 decades on earth, my grandmother, my father's mother, finally passed from this world into eternity.

Isaiah 40:31 "those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

My mom always told me that I have my grandma's hands. My grandmother's hands, which by all rights should have been calloused and weathered from years of hard work, were always unimaginably soft. Her hands felt like feathers. She had an insationable green thumb, she grew the most amazing garden and would always let me pick her flowers.

She gave life to everything she touched.

Even when she moved into a small apartment in a retirement building, her balcony was overflowing with life. As an adult, nearly every time I went to visit her I would bring her flowers, we joked that it is payback for all the flowers I picked over the years. God, I miss her.

I spent a lot of time with my grandma growing up. I was parented by a single mother, who never worked less than 2 jobs for most of my childhood to make ends meet. In many ways my grandmother filled the void where my father should have been. In my last blog entry I shared that I was a hideously awkward adolescent. I spent most every Saturday at my grandma's during my junior high years. I don't know how else to describe it other than to say that my grandmother loved me so much that she made it impossible for me not to love myself. She was there for every major event in my childhood, everything from my first broken bone, to my highschool graduation, to my baptism. Losing her feels like I am losing a parent.


I have been estranged from my father, her son, for nearly 15 years, which is almost all of my young life. When I travel home to say one last goodbye to my grandmother I will see my father, my abuser, for the first time since I was a child. I will be strong, will forgive him, and I will close the book on my relationship with my father forever.

From my grandmother I learned to love and be loved, I learned to forgive, I learned grace, she shared with me all that she could and that I am grateful for. My grandma was very ready to go. I am comforted by that. She lived a long, beautiful, difficult life. Her journey came to a natural elipses... and now she soars on wings like eagles.

Looking at the glass, not through the window

This is from a blog that I had a couple of years ago and have since forgotten about. Before I deleted it I wanted to copy one of the entries to my new blog to give myself some roots. This is such a part of my journey! Reading this short entry brings me back to that summer, before I was married, when I was only half way through my degree in university, and just starting my career. So here it is:

Looking at the glass, not through the window.
On the bus this morning I spent a few minutes watching the tiny beads of condensation that had accumulated on the window. As I watched these beads merge together to form long, streaky drips across the window I noticed that as soon as the molecules gathered enough to form a drip, they then succumb to gravity leaving part of their new fledged community behind. These small molecules, left to the mercy of the sun, quickly evaporated and became a part of the wind. My eyes turn to the page of my book for a moment and then I begin to wonder what it would feel like to evaporate. How amazing it would feel to become a part of the wind! I think about the logistics of condensation. Ideally I would re-condense in my human form; whole, unchanged. But, in actuality, I think that some particles would be forever freed from their bodily prison, only to be enslaved for an eternity by the wind and the rest of my particles would probably be irrevocably disordered. The fact is, you can not become a part of the wind without being changed. And so I decide, right now, that if ever I am presented with the oppurtunity to evaporate and become irrevocably changed by the power of the wind, by the power of the One who makes the wind blow, then I will take it. I will leap from my community of molecules and lay in the heat, clinging to the bus window, waiting for each part of me to be inhaled by the sun and released into the wind. I will sacrifice the temporal for an eternity in the wind.


So this is where I have left off in my journey, a dreamer dreaming a million dreams. My dream now is to leave a legacy, a legacy of positive change, global change...

I will change the world.