May Day

Faced with the question yesterday morning - "to sort laundry or not to sort laundry" - I chose the latter. Instead, we had an amazing late spring day, just the kids and I. Aaron has been in at work continuously - again, I wonder, blessing or trial? Can't even seem to sort the blessings from the trials in this confusing time. A reader here commented that it always seems like someone is deathly ill, and there is very little real life in our household. Yet it is there...crammed in every moment we are not separated by illness or the burdens of work that pile up when we are pulled away unexpectedly to tend hospital stays or diagnostic tests.

We are living life differently now than ever before. My children have been asking lately why our family is in the hospital and other families never go there. I don't have a good answer. It's something Aaron and I have pondered. The only reason we've been able to come up with is that perhaps God knows we are strong in this area of hospitals, illness and such. As nurses, there is little that is unfamiliar, except the actual lived experience of this. We know all the tests, the ins and outs of the hospital environment, how the relationships between services work. Perhaps God knows we can stand the heat of this particular furnace because our learning curve is different here - we know the details and now we just need to understand the issues of the soul, the emotions, the work of it from the patient perspective. I don't know. But that could be it.

So, friend. Here is life. One day of life carved out from among the teardrops and the rainstorms.

An ordinary lunch seemed boring.

So we opted for strawberries and cream.

An ordinary nap just didn't suffice.

So we pitched a tent and slept under the clouds,

bathed clean by the roar of the after-storm wind.

Ordinary bedfellows seemed too routine.

So we woke up with the cat - the outdoor, very pregnant cat.

May Day is anything but ordinary in the little slice of

Scandinavia that is our part of Wisconsin. So we scrounged

up some candy and lilac blossoms and snuck over to the neighbors.

When the storm has passed, the wicked has vanished,

but the righteous person has an everlasting foundation.

Proverbs 10:25