Chinese Lanterns
I don’t know why my Mama was so enamored over Chinese Lanterns.
They look weird to me. Orange blobs hanging off the vines. Some years she would go out to her garden and look in vain. Maybe a vine or two would show up.
This year, they took over her garden. She would like that. Maybe she sees them from heaven.
I tried to grow the silly things for a couple of years. Yep. Zilch. I’d been assured that you couldn’t kill them. They grow like weeds.
Somewhere else, but not in my yard.
A New Season
A new season is upon us. Autumn is a beautiful time of year. It’s so colorful. The Chinese Lanterns are right in there when you look for flowers to fit the season.
It’s the middle time between Summer and Autumn. When the sun slants and throws a golden glow and the heat is not quite as hot as the direct summer sun. The glow is warm and more satisfying.
In-Between Time
And for some of us, it is another kind of in-between time.
In the last week, two more families have lost their dads to heaven. I wonder if it is an epidemic. I feel for them. I understand their bewilderment and pain.
I just finished reading a Nora Roberts novel about a family of four women and their aunt who are in the midst of losing their home. It is a heritage kind of home with stone walls and turrets and time written on its walls. In the story, the sisters are grieving, but coping. I identified—even to the sisters.
Ms. Roberts wrote: “In a matter of moments, the life she’d known was over. The one to come had yet to begin. She was somewhere in a kind of limbo, too stunned from the loss to ache.”
After the Limbo Season
At first, it feels just the way Ms. Roberts wrote it. Limbo. The old life is over. The new life is yet to begin. But the in-between time, the limbo time must come first.
Adjustment takes a while. In the midst of duties and responsibilities, life will still move forward. After the limbo season, colors will burst forth again.
To those families now facing a new life: grieve and feel the pain. Your loved one was special. And I know they are in heaven, right along with my own Mama.
And after a while, time will adjust, and you will feel normal again.
Heavenly Comfort
Even as our Heavenly Father welcomes home His servants in His time, He brings His comfort to those left behind. We grieve, but it is only temporary.
And every one of us must pass this way at some point.
So we lift up one another to our Heavenly Father. It is His arms that hold us closely. He has promised never to leave us nor forsake us.
And His promises are true.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4 NKJV).
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6 NKJV).
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