Choosing to SEE

If you are set to read one of my usual funny, crazy life blogs, you will be disappointed. Three weeks ago my friend lost her beautiful baby boy, and my daughter lost her daycare buddy. It has been such a surreal and horrible tragedy. There are no words for my daughter or my friend. Just last week the daycare placed a memorial picture collage on the wall and my daughter being just 2 herself said, "See mom, there is Strat Strat. He's not dead." I just kissed her and sent her on in while I took myself on out to the van for a good cry. But then I started to think that she was really right. In all of her young innocence and misunderstanding, she is the only one who got it right. Strat Strat is not dead. He is alive and well with his loving King. He is feasting in the banquet halls of his great savior being held and loved by the King of Kings. I recently read the book Choose to See by Mary Beth Chapman. She lost her own child to a similar tragedy two years ago and she reiterates the same point. Choose to SEE that God is real and that the spring is coming. I continue to pray daily for this wonderful, sweet, precious family who is having to wait now to hold their son again and waiting to blow belly raspberries again. I am better understanding the mercies and grace of my King. I know my little rascals are wild and chaotic all of the time, but I can still pick them up and love on them in person during this long hard life. In this I give praise. I can move forward in the hope of Christ and in knowing that Ann had to leave us two years ago to go to her King and help him prepare the place for little Strat Strat. I know Ann loved my children and knew how to blow the best belly raspberries. I believe in the purpose of life and now have a tiny understanding in the purpose of death. I thank God that I know that she is there with little Stratton to hold his mother's place until she arrives. I don't know that I will fully understand the death of a child for a long time, but I am consoled by the fact that Ann and others were waiting at those beautiful gates with a grandmother's hug for a beautiful little blond haired boy that was my daughter's friend.