From the heart!

This week is an easy column. It comes straight from the heart. We celebrated all last week that our seventh grader was going to play his first football game! He has played here in the backyard with his brother and sisters, but Thursday was all about leaving a packed gym from the pep rally and going to Palestine on a bus to suit up in Eagle uniforms. We planned out our maroon and gold and decked out early Thursday morning. Brazos wore his Dad’s old game day tie that he wore to every game he played at Bryan Adams High School. I thought about shoe polishing the car, but knew that was way over the top and would get me banned from even going to the game. I came back home Thursday morning and the minute I walked in the door alone, it hit me that this was one of the things I had prayed for. When I was diagnosed with cancer in April of 2007, I started off chemo pretty good and still took on my tasks with kiddos. However, by the time school started the next Fall, I was weak. I remember on many occasions loading up the kids and driving them to second grade, kindergarten, and Best Friends Daycare, that I owed at the time, with tears rolling down my cheeks. When one of them would say Mom, why are you crying, I would say I had allergies. Then, the battle in my head would begin. They never knew that as we sang Aaron Watson’s “Barbed Wire Halo” or Kenny Chesney’s “Don’t Blink” that there was a war raging in my head. I never used my rearview mirror to look at myself because I was wearing a cap to hide my bald head and bare eyebrows; however, I would adjust it just right so that I could see all of them, still in car seats, lined up and buckled in. I would study each of their faces, learn the freckles, creases in their noses, and recall old scars that told a story of bike crashes and sidewalk mishaps from our Dallas years. I would say to myself things like this… Lord, I thank you that I will see her grow up. Father, I am so happy I will watch him play football one day. Lord, I want to watch him walk across the track at FHS and earn his diploma. Jesus, I am glad that I will watch her Daddy walk her down the aisle. Lord, please, I beg of you, please, let me be their Mom and raise them. I pleaded with God on a regular basis because when you have a “cure rate” and a “stage” hanging over your head; you have to look UP! I would look back and then look UP and say, I just want to be their Mom. Every time I Iooked UP to the Lord, I got to know Him more! Prayers were answered and I have been cancer free for years. Why God chose to heal me and take others, I don’t know. I will never understand. I do know though that when I walked in my house last Thursday and realized that I was living out one of the things I asked the Lord to heal me for, I was completely overwhelmed and grateful. It was humbling and I had to redo my make-up because I cried tears of JOY and ruined my mascara. I do not have a verse in mind this week, but I will tell you this…Jesus is real! Jesus is real and if you do not know Him as your Savior, you should! He will take away your sins and heal you from your hurts. I know I am not promised even tomorrow here on earth, but I am thankful for each day and will spend eternity in heaven!