Life is a journey.

I say that so many times to people as I converse about where we have been and what God has done in our lives.  What really matters is not what the ground under our feet looks like, but how walk the road that is set before us.

If only we had some sort of GPS directions from God that said, "Go here for a time and then do this, then go there and do this... " or even just a simple, "you have reached your destination" would be grand.  When in reality, we are drawing the map as we go.

When the Israelites were in the desert, God used a 'cloud by day and a fire by night' to give them direction.  Being a mother, I think about the women who had to cook, clean, and take care of children... I imagine that every morning after waking, they had to look outside of their tent to see if the cloud had moved or stayed.  Did they ask their husbands something like, "Is it still out there? Do we make breakfast or start packing?"

The desert trek was like a rite of passage with lessons to learn and battles to face.  It was about the journey.  So it is for us.  We must follow the cloud and learn as we go.

We should have posted long ago. The truth is, life happens, and then we think, 'Oh, I should have shared this with someone." But then life continues to tick-tock on, and nothing was ever written down. So, I am giving up on the perfect verbiage, and am going to do just that... write things down.

Our memories are all we have, really, because in the end the stuff, pictures, and things will not last and are just things anyway, and will never encapsulate the truth of our lives.  Our children grow so quickly that it is impossible for us to even capture a part of it.  Baby books, even when I did keep up with them (with our first, for about a month) could never show my daughter what she was like as an infant.  It could not tell her what she smelled like, or describe the softness of her skin or could it show her dearly I and her father loved her then.  She may be able to remember, however, the love she felt from us, when we hold her in our arms now, because it may feel the same to her.  She knows what the closeness of her mother and father feels like by the way we continually love her, and then she may remember what it was like when she was new.   These are the things I want to jog in my memory... and these are the kinds of things I want to try and describe as we remember ...of what God is doing in us at this season of our lives.  If only to remember, in times when we tend to forget, that God worked out a miracle, HE showed Himself to us in a way that was just for us... and the people who were around us that experienced it with us, because He still is holding us in his arms, loving His children as He always has done....

and the story goes on...