That wasn't easy....

Well, it is official we are Texans!  We arrived early this morning and we got up and rinsed the road off and packed up again to head to the big D, Dallas for my non-Texan readers, to help celebrate my sweet nephews birthday.   It is so great to see the family that we haven't seen in awhile and it is soul warming to be enveloped in a hug from someone truly excited to see you.

 I haven't been to Dallas in ages and it was so fun to see sites that are only here in Texas!  Mrs. Baird's bread, LAND, McAllister's deli, Hobby Lobby (I Heart you Hobby Lobby!), and a about a dozen other things that make this home.  Home, it feels so nice like I'm complete and I understand how the world operates here.    I love that there is a church on every corner!

However, my heart has another love too and because of that leaving California was not easy!

 How can you compete with the weather - it is paradise!  The Pacific ocean and its coast is one of God's masterpieces, the family - the family is something to weep over - and I did!  I will miss them fervently, but at the same time I'm so glad to have left some family behind....not in the, "man that one uncle is crazy"  reason to want to leave someone behind, but in the love they have for me and my family and we for them,  we leave some of our own love behind.  Some of our love that can be left when visiting dear Timothy or a flower placed because they loved him too.   

So you see leaving was not easy, but like most things in life the right thing to do is typically the hardest and so while I feel as if it was tragically unfair for me, his mother, to have to decide to let Timothy go and to decide if I was strong enough to move away from his place of burial (even though in my heart I know he isn't there) it was necessary for my family and so we did, but leaving was not easy.

Unfortunately since sin entered the world mothers have felt that knife blade thousands of time. The grief that has no counterpart - the grief of a part of your own heart dying and beating all at the same time.  The magnitude of pain that hurts so bad it awakens a part of your senses that is shocked that it is survivable.   And while all that whirls around, making decisions for the children that God has entrusted to our care.  

Grief is a crazy thing, this post was originally titled "Oh my, that was a LONG trip..." and all I intended to say was some pithy thing about being all moved and starting to get settled but I guess underlying behind the smile more needed to be said - and basically such is my life a smile and a tear all at the same time.  A heart a little alive and a little not.  

Anyway, we made it safely.