Turn Grief into Purpose: Make Each Day Count

It's morbid, but I've been thinking about death. We just passed one month since losing our dog to probable cancer, and one year since a close friend lost his battle with addiction. Several people I know are battling cancer, mental illness, addiction, and a host of other serious health problems, and it fills me with grief for the suffering around me.

It brings up old memories of people I've lost. And sometimes it draws a stark contrast between the people I know - and the many aspects of those same people that I didn't know. makes me wonder what I'm leaving behind.

Recently, there was a sortof trend on Twitter/X, where people were using an AI system to read their Twitter/X accounts and roast them. I played along just for fun and not surprisingly, the roast included terms like "self-help guru" and "dog worship" and "gardening analogies." What it didn't make fun of me for was my faith - and I took that as a callout. I think I'm living my faith well, in the quiet moments of my private life. I serve people I see in need, I'm active in my church, and nothing makes me quite as happy as nerding out in an hours-long Bible study or theological discussion. But will that be what people who know me remember when I'm gone?

I've spent a lot of time thinking of that this week so I thought I'd share it with you, not to be weird or to be a downer, but as a remembrance and an encouragement. Grief is inescapable in life (and so is being roasted, since apparently we're making a game of it now), and when we're gone, the evidence of our lives is all our loved ones will have left to see more of who we were. So let me encourage you to spend a little time thinking on that as you go through the coming week. What's the evidence in your life, and what does that evidence prove about who you are?

Are you kind? I don't mean, "Do you think you're kind?" or "Are you trying to be kind?" but "Do other people see you as kind?" Are you caring, gentle? Generous? Compassionate? Do you actually treat people well (the way you would want to be treated)? If you're a person of faith like me...do the people around you actually know that? Do you leave people and places better than they were before? Not just better for you, but for others?

If those kinds of questions and wonderings make you squirm a little, if they make you uncomfortable, if they bother you...if they trigger defiance in you...then examine those things. Study them. Practice actually doing better, rather than just planning to. Because no matter what your beliefs are, we only get to be here so long, and if you didn't live it, there will be no evidence of it.

In other news, this week really was spent in serving the people I love. Between a bachelorette party, an afternoon of cooking for and visiting a friend who had had foot surgery, and preparing (and praying my heart out) for my spiritual dad's upcoming heart surgery, there wasn't a lot of time for writing.

STILL FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM is still coming along though, and I'm hoping to finish chapter 15 this week. In the meantime, we're thirty-six weeks away from the release of the expanded second edition of FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, and I'm so excited I can hardly stand it! After spending almost a year deeply buried in the story of Christine's life after domestic abuse, I'm reminded all over again of how much I love these characters. I hope when it's time, you'll love them too. Until next week...