When the Sun Shines after a Storm

I love the seasons.  Mark and I lived in Hawaii for a few years when we were first married.  And although I understand it is paradise, I still missed the changing of the seasons and longed to be back home again in Indiana. 

 I had a sweet woman from my church ask me recently how we were doing with our loss.  She said, "I hate that it happened in the fall because then you had to deal with the most depressing months of the winter right after that."

I explained to her that I actually felt the opposite.  The seasons and the weather matched my mood.  After Sawyer's death, the weather turned cold and icy.  It gave me time to grieve and not feel like I had to smile because it was sunny and gorgeous outside.  The outside matched my own insides- cold, dark, and sad.  I had extreme grief and needed those dark months to work through it.

 It has been seven months and the sun is out again.  The snow has melted and the salt has been cleaned off of the streets.  The weather is warming up and the flowers have bloomed.

New life has begun again.  

I am enjoying the warmth and the sunshine and the flowers.  

Although there is an occasional rainy day or even a passing storm, where my heart is breaking and hurting, the sun always comes back out again.

"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."

Ecclesiastes 3:1