TAKE TIME

I seem to always discover a treasure about my Mama. She passed away a year ago today. Somehow, after she was gone, I ended up with her workbook from a discipleship class she was in many years ago. It has been incredible to read in her own handwriting about her faith and love for God. Just two weeks ago I looked at it again and discovered something I had never seen before....a remark she had made about my life. In fact, it was something I had never known she thought about me, and reading it in her own handwriting brought me such joy. It was if she was speaking right to me.

How many times do we hesitate sharing our feelings with those we care about? What makes us hesitate? Are we afraid we will be judged? Are we afraid that we will not live up to their expectations? Are we concerned our words will hurt them? Are we even afraid they will not care about out thoughts? Our human mind creates all kinds of scenarios, but in the very end, those scenarios mean very little. What matters is telling those we love how we feel, and just allowing God to take care of what must needs to be taken care of.

When Mama praised me, it was special. What I read that day in her workbook, I would have loved to have known while she was living. If I had known she felt about me in that way, we could have shared our hearts in ways that might have made us so much more closer. There are also many things I would love to tell her now, and I can't. Even though she was here for a lifetime, that lifetime became too short. She passed into eternity with the God she loved.

“People are like the grass,” Isaiah wrote. “Their beauty fades as quickly as the flowers in a field. The grass withers and the flowers fade beneath the breath of the Lord. And so it is with people. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:6b-8, NLT). Life is but a vapor in God's cosmos of time. Take every opportunity to tell those in your life how much you love them. The opportunities will not always be there. The only thing that lasts is God's incredible love, and His Word which endures until the end of time.