I may have just discovered another favourite author--always an exciting find. :) I'm currently reading "Hidden Places" by Lynn Austin and it's the first of her books that I've ever read. I'm really liking it. Of late, I have been hard pressed to pick up a fiction book that's kept me reading and eager to pick it up again so this one is a treat...especially since I can relate to things in it...which brings me to the point of this post.
Aunt Batty decided to top off the evening by reading us some "literature," as she called it. Now, I'd read the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow before, but I'd never noticed how much dying there was in all of them--the blacksmith's wife in "The Village Blacksmith," the sea captain's little girl in "The Wreck of the Hesperus." When I'd listened to all I could stand, I chased the kids up to bed, then lit into Aunt Batty like an angry mama bear.
"I don't ever want you reading poems about sadness and dying to my kids again, you hear me? We've seen enough death!" My harsh words bounced right off her like hail off a tin roof.
"Dying is simply part of living, Toots." Her childlike smile never left her face as her knitting needles flew. "Everything in the whole world has to die sometime. That's the way God made things."
"Then I don't think God cares about life very much."
"Oh, that's not true!" Her knitting fell to the floor as she stood and gripped my arm. Concern was written all over her face. "Life is very precious to God. That's why He made it so fragile and so short."
"That makes absolutely no sense."
"Yes, it does. He made it fragile so we would treasure it, just like He does. You're not nearly as careful with your cast-iron frying pans as you are with your good china, are you? God wanted life to be precious to us--so He made it as frail as fine china."
I disagree slightly in that I don't believe God MADE things to die--that's part of living in a fallen world--but I know what she's saying. It was the sections in bold about the fragility of life that stood out to me. Life is definitely a very fragile thing. Freak accidents and tragedies bring that home in particularly unforgettable way.
Somebody said to me recently that, even with what happened last year with Steve, you do tend to forget that there is no guarantee of the future. With all genuine respect to the person, I thought (but didn't say), "That's because it wasn't your husband." It wasn't a nasty or angry thought...it was just a mild, unspoken comment. When something totally reshapes your entire life, it's pretty hard to forget.
This section of the book gave some possible worth to fragility, though, and it has given me some good food for thought.
Speaking of the fragility of life, I spent most of a recent hour this evening crying through Domestic Blitz. Stories like this turn me into a blubbering mess but I am really liking the increasing number of tv shows that do something special for people who are doing it really tough. I don't care if big companies donate stuff just to get publicity out of it because, at the end of the day, it touches people's lives.
