Wow.

So just a moment ago I had an epiphany. A rather startling epiphany, that is. My life so far, I've always felt pained and hurt by the past like it couldn't have happened in an even worse fashion. Well, I was thinking about how I'm so wrong. Pain has made me the person I am today.

I was listening to a song by David Crowder Band called How He Loves us and it just sort of hit me.
"Heaven meets earth like an unforseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest. And I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way...He loves us Oh he how he loves us Oh how he loves us Oh how he loves."

And so I started thinking through reasons of why I used to be so hurt and I realized that it wasn't anything I could have controlled. The blame I had always placed upon my self vanished. Death was not something I was the dicider of. If God wanted them back, then he could have them no matter how much I missed them now. I realized in my heart that I would see them again soon enough.

When I was younger, I went to my grandmother's house everyday. All of our cousins went everyday. So my brother and I would go upstairs and play with our cousins in the playroom attick, but seeing as they were all guys they usually kicked me out. Sarah, my only girl cousin, would try to get me to play with them sometimes but it usually didn't work out, and I usually ended up going downstairs to sit in a room by myself. Well one day, my grandmother got really sick. Dealthy sick. Cancer was killing her from the inside out. Not that I knew that at the time, I just knew she was sick and I needed to leave her alone. And she stayed sick. After a while she was taken care of at home by a nurse that would come see her everyday, and everyday I would sit on the stairs and watch her take care of my grandmother. Well one day, as I remember it, her heart monitor started slowing but I didn't think anything of it, I just thought she was asleep. I was so young I didn't realize how serious the situation was. Well I sat on the stairs and listened to her heart monitor slow into one steady line of a beep. I'd never heard that before. What I hadn't realized at the time was that my grandmother had just died. I got scared and started calling for my mom but before I knew it all my aunts and uncles and my mom and the nurse where in there crying. It wasn't until the funeral that I'd realized what I'd witnessed at such a young age.

When I was six I was diagnosed with a near deadly kidney problem that my cousin Sarah had also had when she had been my age. Sarah's cleared up with the pill we'd had to take once a day; mine didn't. I had to have surgery when I was twelve. But that's not the point. My parents, bother being teachers, couldn't take off work to take care of me when I got sick during the school year so they had their friend, my first best friend besides Kennedy Collier, to take off work and take me home. His name was Steve Birely and he'd had the same birthday as me, and as much as I can remember he'd come to alot of my birthday parties. Steve made me take my medicine everyday even though I never wanted to. When I was thirteen, a year after my kidney surgery, Steve died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. His request was that we spread his ashes on our farm from the top of our highest hill.

So while I was thinking about these two significant incidinces in my life, I realized that even though it hurt me I was happy to let them go. Because I know that one day I'll see them again, and then I'll have the chance to thank them for everything they did for me. I consider myself lucky to have the pain of losing my two closest childhood best friends go. I consider myself lucky to get to see them again one day. Because they both are with God.

John 3:16 "For God loved the world so much, that he sent his one and only son, so that whoever beilieves in him, shall not die forever, but live forever."