Sharing the wealth, 01-01-13

While John was still in ICU, our brother-in-law's sister-in-law's mother (did you follow that?) gave us a bottle of Lourdes water that I used daily to bless John and his body. The bottle flew with us to Chicago, and stayed in the drawer in John's room at RIC, and I bleesed him on each visit.Although the feel of the cold water was at times a little painful for John's senstive skin, the water's healing powers were worth it. This weekend, on the 5-month anniversary of John's accident, we passed on the bottle to a neighbor whose teenage son is fighting his own battle in ICU. And the bottle gave me another sign of John's healing: the fact that I could let it go to pass it on to someone who now needed it more than us was a poignant clue thatwe're making progress here.

A well-used bottle of holy water from Lourdes



Please add our neighbor's son to your prayers. He has a very long journey ahead of him, but the prognosis is hopeful.

Happy New Year!

From our priest's homliy today for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God: "The story of the Nativity is not just a story of the beginning of life; it is a story of life interrupted... In the sorrows and the setbacks, in the joys and the glorias, God was with Mary always." What a comforting message as we enter this new year.

Last night, we celebrated how far we've come on this journey together with a small reminder of the way we spent our first married New Year's eve:

And we toasted our love for each other with our wedding flutes (given to us by our dear friends from Chapin). And we even made it up til midnight, saying a bittersweet goodbye to 2012. We made it! Tomorrow we'll look ahead at the hard work that still awaits John, but for now we pause to savor how far we've come.