Today the gray heavens have moved toward the earth and wet snow is falling through the dense winter air, covering the earth in a slushy mess that makes the warmth of my fireplace welcome.  Eternal perspectives swirl inside the place where thoughts are born as I comfortably sit in my recliner looking at the graveyard filled with headstones and people resting that once scurried between each daily activity in a hurried rush to get life lived.

This week has given my little sister a blow of a trial.  My parents called her the caboose when she was born because she trailed behind the rest of us and brought up the ending of their family.  She is seven years younger than I am and although she is an adult that has successfully emerged from the refiner's fire, she is still my younger sister and I feel a protectiveness about her that wishes to ease the pain wedged deeply in her heart.   Her baby, my niece quietly and peacefully returned to her Heavenly Father without ever tasting the bitter air of a mortal life.

I have felt hurt so intense that I was physically driven to my knees by the awesomeness of the weight. I have walked quiet, midnight hallways filled with a restless pain.  I have stared at the dark doorway of my house and known an evil was on the other side wanting in.  I have known the despair and helplessness that comes from being hunted by someone wishing me dead.  However, I have never felt the deep intensity of placing my child's lifeless body in the grave then walking away.  It is more than I could face.  The hollow home where she should have been sleeping in a warm bedroom surrounded by her family's love would be unbearable. We all have our personal fire and we all have our limits.  The choices we make to either emerge,stay in, or not even enter the fire define who and what we become.  Then what we becomes attracts others to us or repeals them from us.  No matter how hard we try we cannot hide what we are, it radiates from us and attracts those like us.  If we are looking to break free from a hurtful place and attract those that will lift us there, we must become one that also lifts.

It has been more than a year since I left my 17 year marriage that was so hurtful.  The year was my goal point.  I often repeated silently and to others that everything would be ok in a year.  I said that the awfulness that was my reality would ease in just a year's time.  It has been a year, a year since in his selfish, diminished mental ability he has touched me, since he has tried to force his will, since he has been a daily part of my life.  I am sitting in  my house, the one that is being paid for by my labor and I know that in a year I have come a long way.  But there is still a lingering sadness that wonders what parts of me were so broken that he could not love me, wondering why he could only see the beautiful children we created as having inherited broken parts from me that needed to be plucked from them like weeds overtaking a productive garden.  I have healed some, but there is still a deep fear of the brokenness that he told me about everyday.  It must be inside me, embedded so deep as to not be able to be dislodged.  It must be there, because he told me that it was and he was supposed to love me.  He was supposed to help me, so it must be there because he saw it and wanted it gone.

Saturday mornings are my favorite times to sit and ponder.  I love to study and read new ideas and expand upon old ones.  Today I read some profound words from Dieter F. Uchtdorf, "Healing comes when we choose to walk away from darkness and move towards a brighter light".  My healing has been delayed by some of my choices.  I have put a halt in my healing and more importantly in my children's healing because I have stopped reaching for higher places.  I have been looking for comfort in the same places where I found pain.  Through common sense it stands to reason that I am only going to find more pain there.  Albert Einstein summed it up in once sentence, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create them."   I can't become what I am meant to by allowing the pain to keep returning me to where I was.  Right now I am standing in the fire, but I should be looking for wings to emerge from the fire and by doing so I will emerge as the person that was meant to be created from the fire.