On The Verge

I've spent most of the past six months on the verge of tears nearly twenty-four hours a day. From sheer joy to intense pain, life lately has been tear-inducing.

Have you ever had a moment when you're going about your day and all of a sudden you're just overwhelmed with ... with...with something you just can't put your finger on. You just want to cry and you don't know why. That's been me a lot lately. 

I was ticking things off my to do list: call so and so, organize this, put away that, update this event on facebook, and BAM tears. They stopped me in my tracks. They came after posting an event page for our church's Tuesday Night Sunday School in a facebook group and being met with two simple words "sounds amazing!" in response. It IS amazing. It's beyond amazing. It's family. It's love. It's doing and giving and believing and learning. It's people getting together and sharing something too deep and meaningful for words, even though on the outside it just looks like pizza and lessons and songs and crafts.  I feel so blessed to be able to be a part of that. 

And then I got up to get some things done around the house and hit a wall of pain. I'd fallen earlier, my legs giving out for no apparent reason, and hurt just about every part of my body. Tears from pain, but also from fear streamed down my face. The legs giving out thing is a big deal. A huge deal. A possibly life-changing deal. The what-ifs flood in, a cascade of tears with them. 

Reading through my kids' daily homeschool notebooks, I come across a page on which my child has written things he loves about our family. It melted my heart. All my worry about whether or not the kids take on too much around the house, whether or not they get to go enough places and experience enough things, whether or not my illness is ruining their lives vanished. Tears of relief threatened to dot the page as I read it again and again. 

And then another...

Pulling myself together, I continued to read the other kids' notebooks, and was propelled back to tears by more amazing, loving words. Especially these....

Some days I don't feel like I live up to those words, but I do my best. My heart is on the verge of bursting with gratitude and love. I thank God every day that life's blessings outweigh the struggles.