drawing near

You don't realize something is the last until after it is.

What I wouldn't do to be sitting around my grandmother's table in Somerset, PA tomorrow, eating pork and sauerkraut with my Grandpa at the other end of the table, my mom beside me and aunt and sister and brother and dad, Grandma barely sitting two minutes before flitting off for some forgotten something.  

Every New Year's Day we did that, and I don't know when the last time was, or why, but it's no more and can't be recreated...I can't help feeling in a different world, anyway, this first holiday season of my life with none of my extended family.  

And I don't know when Lily lost her chubby cheeks or when she suddenly got so grown up, reminding me fifty times that she doesn't want any "kid things" for Christmas and telling me exactly how to ice her birthday cake, in just another day now.

I can't put my finger on when Haiti became home or when Creole became natural or when our family didn't have Nora or when I was perfectly content without Matt in my life or when I started finding gray in my hair or when this adventure became our adventure became just life.

I don't know when it all happened, nor what will happen this year.

But there is just so much peace and comfort in the knowledge that He knows the firsts and the lasts, that no one opens doors He hasn't, that know one shuts doors He's opened, that no one builds on a foundation other than Christ (1 Cor. 3:11), that tomorrow is no new year to Him, that there is nothing new under the sun...and that He doesn't patch us together, but recreates us, and He isn't hiding, but drawing near.

How much of our parenting, how much of our relationshipping, how much of our working and living and striving and spending is all for a kingdom not His?  

This year, may His kingdom be obvious in our lives, and ours, die a little more.

He's drawing near, this year.  That's my prediction, and my resolution, to be like Him, to draw near, too.