The light at the end of the tunnel- starts with a garden?

It will be four years in September. Bill died or came to life....on September 20, 2006. Some days it feels like yesterday and I need to ask him something. Other days, sad days- I have to look at a picture to remember his face. It feels like another life ago. And it was.
It was a good life, a great one on occasion. I was busy with homeschooling, gardening, keeping up with my life and the people who filled it. Trying hard at motherhood. Trying harder at marriage. It was all about my roles in relationship to the people who needed me. When I had a moment to think what I wanted from life, it felt self centered and somehow disloyal to my family. And I am grateful for the amazing fruit of those years of pouring into my family.

  I am especially grateful for the fifteen months Bill and I had in the garden of cancer. Yes, a garden. A place of fruitfulness after a season of work.  This particular garden where weeds of fatigue and fear threaten threaten to choke out any small, hopeful bloom. Where there was no reason to expect fruit.  But every garden has its season and our time had great moments of peace, grace, unleashed love, happiness and joy. These were the rare and precious produce of that garden.

I love that old, rather sappy hymn "I Come to the Garden Alone".  Childhood memories of a church with soft light on golden, peeled logs and sturdy, old hymns wind around my mind and are overlapped with memories of gardens I have wandered through.  And He truly did "walk with me and He talked with me. And He told me I was His own.... and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has every known."

Well, there goes the writing time. Off to work.. Part Two-the light at the end of the tunnel.
domani, doppa domani. 

I Come To The Garden Alone

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

Refrain
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

Refrain

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.