life: acoustic & amplified

you gotta find your truth!

Ok, this cracked me up – and made me a think! So true for most of us! Yes, I have ‘the need to please others’ so ingrained into my thinking, it seems I battle it every day!

I watched an unconventional wedding video a few minutes ago of my eldest daughter, Krista, who turned 25 yesterday. She is a beautiful, smart, incredibly talented and giving woman – who is very blessed to have a relationship which has given her something she has always been searching for – unconditional love and friendship.  This has been my prayer for her for so many years – that she would be truly loved by someone for who she is. That is all. Unconditional love is the key to living.

Her lifestyle is not what I would have chosen for her – she is in a world which can be dangerous and I worry about her and where her choices can lead. I want only good for her. However, it is her life and her choice to live how she has chosen. I wish her, and my new son-in-law and grandchild, only happiness and I was moved to tears by the words they spoke to each other, the healing which this love has brought to her. I know the depth of her emotion. I know how much she cares and loves. I know how badly she has been hurt by life, by my own actions as her mother – when I made choices no mother should have to make and she got caught in my choices, in my pain and her own – as a child she had no way to understand, nothing but pain and hurt from age 10 on. She was in a world which she did not understand and which did not understand her.

I am so grateful and happy for this place in her journey and how much this love is restoring to her. I am hopeful that I can be a part of her living, of her joy and her future – the love, heartaches and blessings and hard times.

Yesterday, as I thought about the day she came into the world – the most beautiful baby ever born up to that minute (ok, I’m a little biased on that one – haha), I was so overwhelmed by those feelings I had as I looked in her face for the first time and prayed that I might keep her safe and be a good mother to her. It has been an incredibly tough journey and I have failed her in so many ways, yet, I have loved her, and her brother and sister with a love which is bigger than I can ever put into words. My mothers’ heart has placed these children in God’s hands and I am so blessed, more than she may ever know, that she is my daughter.

There are no accidents and I trust God has plans I cannot see. I do not have all the answers – I believe unconditional love is always right and the way to healing. All I know is – I am so blessed and so thankful in this moment. I know for sure that life is good – we are good. God has declared it and it is so!