Yesterday, I posted about the nudges we get from God. During the season of my transition from wife to widow, He nudged me to become a messenger of His love and grace on Facebook. I am still carrying on because it was an aha for me that I COULD write, and the experiences of my life were for a purpose. The test became my testimony. A couple of days ago, a friend and I were talking about God’s goodness. He went on to tell me that during some of the roughest periods of his life, during the night hours, he became a poet. He’d have to quickly get out of bed to write the words down. During that season he wrote over 275 poems. He said, I was asked to read one I wrote for the Oklahoma Murrah Building Bombing Memorial Service. The poem spoke of the fireman who was last to hold the baby girl (Baylee Almon) before she passed away, but how, out of that tragedy, I wrote this poem of love for Baylee. At the end of the memorial service, a woman came and thanked me for my poem. That woman was the little girls mother. My friend’s pain, that led to his poem, became a precious gift to this mom. And when I looked on the internet for Aren Almon (Baylee’s mother) to see what has become of her, I found that she runs The Protecting People First Foundation - a non-profit organization which she was a part of setting up in her daughters memory and which educates people on safety measures and how to deal with both natural and man-made disasters. I was amazed at what I found. “Losing my daughter, Baylee, in the Oklahoma City Bombing is something I’ll never fully recover from, but my daughter’s death was not in vain and her memory is serving as a powerful tool in saving lives and making America safer.” She turned her scars into stars. She, too, turned her pain to a blessing for others. Very often, when we go through really tough times, there are opportunities right in the midst of them, to turn it for good. Maybe this is a challenging, painful and uncomfortable time in your life. Rather than succumbing to it all and wallowing in self-pity and despair, perhaps it’s time to rise to the occasion and discover the rose amongst the thorns, the sun in the clouds, the light in darkness -- and realize this could be a set-up for something really grand that God wants to bring from it. I know thats what God did for me, for my poet friend, and for Aren Almon. He can for you, too!
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 12:22:41 +0000
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