Lessons Learned

  

 We have learned a lot of lessons in the last eight months.  The biggest obviously how compassionate and kind our community is and the other big one how excruciatingly painful it is to loose a child.  I had this idea that when parents loose a child they went through a couple of years of grieving and then it slowly faded away and everything was normal again.  Yes I know a lot of you think, that’s just ridiculous, you don’t have to loose a child to know that’s not the case but honestly I had never had someone close enough loose a child that I actually knew any better.  We have so many friends who’ve never lost a child, yet they are so compassionate and understanding and they love and honour Roderick in so many different ways. 

   Some other less important lessons are how expensive a cemetery plot is, how stressful to make all the decisions and how long you have to sit in that office to get it all finalized.  Then you’ve got to decide on a gravestone and you find out it takes half a year for it to actually get installed which seems ridiculous because it’s during that first half year where the most people come to visit the gravesite or so it seems to me but I might be wrong.  

   Another lesson is how precious life is.  Just this week I was in the grocery store and I saw a mother with her two young daughters shopping.  What a brave mother, anyway I hear her patiently talking to her children and I’m thinking just never forget how precious they are, you realize that very quickly when you loose one.  Or I hear parents talking about how overwhelmingly busy it is taking their kids to all their doings and I’m thinking just enjoy it because you never want that to be taken away from you.  Now that doesn’t mean I never get frustrated or overwhelmed, in fact I have to remind myself more often then others.

   A huge lesson is not to worry about what other people think and to freely grieve and be our selves.  It doesn’t matter if some people think we should do it differently.  It has also freed me to worry less what people think in other areas of life.  I mean, I have to work at it but I just feel heaven is my true home and I’m just doing my job here until I go home so whether people like me or not is not that important as long as I’m doing the job I’m destined to do.  By this I do not mean that I cannot find joy in doing my job and enjoy life.  I can and we will again.  It’s all right if people see my short comings and mistakes too, because we all have those and God is so gracious so why be worried if others see that we’re imperfect.  In fact I find most people are also very gracious and are quite willing to forgive us our mistakes, I’m usually the one that is hardest on myself anyway.

   So to wrap it all up, yes we’ve learned these lessons and they are important to us but more and more as time goes by we tend to again slip into our old ways and we have to keep reminding our selves to keep working at and living the lessons we have learned.