Overheard at the graves lunch table today:

Casey:  mom, let's pray for Cody right now!

Mom:  Okay! 

Casey:  God...please please please heal Cody so he can talk.......like me!

Mom:  Amen!  What a GREAT prayer little one!  Hey, if Cody can talk someday, what do you think he'll say first?

((Casey makes raspberry sound))

Mom:  Hahahaha.  Do you want to know what I think Cody's first words would be?  I think he'd say...'I love my brother.  I'm so glad he prayed for me...'

Casey smiled.

These moments melt my heart.  God is building such a compassion in Casey's little heart.  Sometimes I feel like I should be wearing a veil during these moments...God seems ever so close.  And that is how He redeems our days ~ by using Cody's illness for good.  

Our friend Carolyn was watching Casey last week and he fell down and she said, 'watch out...you might hurt yourself if you keep climbing on the furniture!'  Casey answered, 'That's okay Carolyn...God is a Healer!'

Last night Cody was up from midnight to 3am...and today I got out of bed feeling ancient.  I literally could barely put 1 foot in front of the other.  And yet here I sit at the end of the day, looking back and feeling so blessed by my kids and our life.  I *always* make it thru the day no matter how little sleep I get.  It is our daily miracle...that I don't face-plant a few times!  Haha.  He gives grace for the day and for me ~ grace for the moment.  And He never fails to insert those amazing moments that remind me of who's in charge...of my responsibility to be grateful...and of my need to soak in all we have. 

I watched a special on Mozambique last night and how the communities are just wilting because there's no fresh drinking water.  They're trying various pumps, etc.  But it showed all these people standing in line in bare feet, dusty, thirty, no doube hungry too...and it humbled me.  We'd just returned from Costco and gotten a case of bottled water plus a bunch of other food.  In so much of our world they don't even have running water!  And we here in America have the luxury of going to stores with food lining the shelves, with money in our wallets, and with extra weight on our bodies from having so much.  I used to watch those specials and think, 'oh well....'

But since Cody's been sick, God has done a work in my heart about gratitude.  Oddly, I was not a very grateful person before.  And shock of shocks...now with a child who has such a fragile life...I am more grateful than I ever have been.  There's something about suffereing that takes your blinders off.  It tills the soil of your heart.  You see suffering elsewhere and you feel a kinship ~ yet you also can latch onto that all-important perspective that so so many have it so so much worse. 

In our Home Fellowship we often muse that we so take for granted the simple ability we have to meet openly - in public - and worship God.  In so many places that is punishible by death!  I marvel at what there is to be grateful for and how I spent so much of my life only thinking of me and mine.  That is the gift you receive with a sick child.  Not a gift I ever would have requested for Christmas!  Yet it is the gift I've been given to help me survive the road I walk.

Course it's hard to remember that gift when you're up from midnight to 3am!  I hope tonight is different.  Poor Cody just has such a hard time staying asleep even with melatonin and clonadine on board.  Sometimes at those hours I feel like I'm losing my mind ~ the sound of raspberries bore a hole in my brain.  Thank Heaven for ear plugs! 

Well that's all for now.  It's 9:30 so I'm going to try to get sleep while I can!  Love to all,

Shawna