Golden Days...

I keep doing it, and I can't seem to help it.

In the golden sunshine there's a deep sense of foreboding. These golden days. They take me back to the golden days of last spring. With two healthy, happy little girls... a life that was overflowing... a life that was blissfully happy... and hurtling headlong into a nightmare.

I lay in bed with Ava yesterday. Stroking that golden hair while she fell off to sleep and feeling sick in the pit of my stomach at the memories.

We had no idea.

And I begin to wonder how I can ever be blissfully happy again when there is always that nagging doubt, that underlying fear that perhaps there is a dark cloud heading for us again. And we don't even know.

Just like we didn't know. This time last year.

And I realise then, that I could be eaten up by this. Destroyed. From the inside out. Eaten up by the memories of the anguish and heartache. The shock. The unbelievable shock. And the uncertainty and doubt... and the questions that still hang over our Heidi... it could devour me.

But it won't.

Not because I have this amazing super-strength. Not because I'm a "inspiring person" and somehow won't ask the questions that everyone asks when their child has a life-threatening illness. Not because my faith is water-tight and unquestioning.

But because the Saviour was underneath us in the pit. He went lower. He held us there. And I know now, if he can hold me there? He can hold me anywhere.

And that's why, when the memories flood back, when the foreboding sets in... I can chase it away. I can defeat it. Because I don't know what tomorrow holds...

But I do know who holds tomorrow.

These golden days. I'm going to cherish them.

Because they are beautiful... and what is a life, if always lived in fear?

²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

- Matthew 6:25-26 -