"..We know each other as we always were.."

Trying to work on clearing a closet today and found pictures,cards & letters from our children. 

Got very little done but the memories

 stuffed into those closet spaces !!

 To the outside world, we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were, we know each other’s hearts, we share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys.

– Clara Ortega 

I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries.

– Jandy Nelson 

Your siblings are the only people in the world who know what it’s like to have been brought up the way you were.

– Betsy Cohen 

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago 

– the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker,

 the avoider…

It doesn’t seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we’ve traveled.

– Jane Mersky Leder

“How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in peace” 

Psalm 133:1 (Voice)

"what is unseen..."

“What is unseen.”

Picture from my friend from Iraq OIF 2008 Where he boarded many helicopter missions.

“ Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces”

-George MacDonald

Reading this 📖 by Timothy Keller,

Walking with God through Pain and Suffering.

Is helping in times like this tragic helicopter crash, in California, and evil we can'’t comprehend.💔

"I want it to come untrue!

Life is unpredictable.

He talks about the final judgment and renewal of the world and says “And why could it not be that our future glory will actually so “swallow” the evil of the past that in some unimaginable way even the memory of the evil won’t darken our hearts but only make us happier?

CS Lewis writes -when on earth, people say “no future bliss can make up” for particular instance of suffering, “not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” 

JRR Tolkien - “Envisions a time in which “everything sad is going to come untrue.”

 “The evil we see today was not part of God’s original design. It was not God’s intent for human life.

That means that ultimately, even a peaceful death at the age of ninety years old is not the way things were meant to be. Those of us who sense the “wrongness“ of death – in any form – are correct. 

The “rage at the dying of the light"  is our intuition that we were not meant for mortality,

 for the loss of love, or for the triumph of darkness. In order to help people face death and grief we often tell people that death is a perfectly natural part of life. 

But that asks them to repress a very right and profound human intuition – that we were not meant to simply go to dust, 

and that love was meant to last."

-Timothy Keller

“So we do not set our sights on the things we can see with our eyes. All of that is fleeting; it will eventually fade away. Instead, we focus on the things we cannot see, which live on and on.”

2 Corinthians 4:18 (VOICE)