THE HOUR GLASS

I was standing in the bathroom this morning listening to music while making the waves in my hair a bit wavier with the curling iron.  Totally lost was I in the routine of getting ready, feeling the music, and letting my thoughts wander through my mind's wildflower patch.  How long he stood there watching me, I don't know.  When I looked up there stood my husband gazing, transfixed - me totally unaware that he had been staring.  He had such a look of love on him, completely caught up watching and loving.  I asked how long he had been standing there.  His eyes lit up and love filled all the space around him, "A few minutes," he said.  As he gently kissed my cheek and pulled me in close I heard his words of love.  But even if there would have been no words, I felt his silent language powerfully.  Just the day before we got a call from a friend of ours with news that his wife's cancer had returned - stage 4, metastasized and widespread.  Without any treatment her life expectancy would be 3-6 months and not much more with treatment.  That news left me rattled, both for them and what it made me think about in my own life.  You can know in your head that all of life is iffy and borrowed - that we don't know the start or stop of it - that God ordains life and death.  But when parameters are set, measured, shortened by such news, we are not ready to end all that we know and love . . . life.  Illness is devastating, overwhelming, moves you to the pit area of life and forever changes things.  I thought about cancer and what role it had played in my world years earlier.  I thought about how much I love my life now, how much I love my husband, how finally I was experiencing joy and love and fulfillment.  I thought about what I would do faced with the news our friends had gotten.  What exactly would I feel or decide in terms of treatment, or no treatment, about leaving this earth and my family behind.  From there I thought about age.  Whether we get cancer, heart disease, or something else that takes our life, we all age and reach death.  I tried to suppress a sorrow inside of knowing the day would come, naturally from age or illness that I would be separated physically from Doug and those I love.  This amazing love in the physical world of life would cease.  We are not immortal.  There is a physical end.  God speaks about holding possessions (literal and non-literal possessions) loosely in life as they are finite, passing, ending.  He tells us to instead set our minds on things above.  God must know how deep sorrow can be.,  What a fine line to love our life, our relationships, the gifts God gives us, to be fulfilled in life but also to realize there is more.  I cannot see that more from my vantage point fully.  It requires faith, trust and trading what I know is behind Curtain Number 1 for what I don't fully comprehend or see for what is behind Curtain Number 2.  I thought about our friends, asking God to give them joy for whatever journey or time is in front of them, eyes beyond their humanity and pleasure in each other knowing that their love originated from God.