One Good Woman

I'm grateful for my words; not always the ones that come out of my mouth but always, always the ones that come out through my fingers. Two nights ago as I was unpacking a box of books I came across the binder my Mom filled with every letter I wrote her during my entire mission. I started reading the letters and before long I was completely entranced, unable to part from the pages that once were the story of my life, but now only a far-distant memory. I remembered the long days at the MTC and my longing to forget myself and enter the mission field in Taiwan. I was reminded of great miracles I thought at the time I would never forget (and somehow had) and my urgent desire to make a difference in the world, one scooter contact at a time. I felt the pain of heartbreak, betrayal and disappointment right along with my 21-year-old self and before long I was weeping at my dining room table, feeling so much empathy for the naive young girl who thought she knew something about love and about life. I was overcome by the faith and the testimony that was so evident in every last letter. This was a girl who knew God. This was a girl who loved Jesus. This was a girl who had complete trust in Their ways. And this girl was me. Ten years later, it was humbling indeed to feel my spirit strengthened by words I wrote in a small internet cafe in Taichung.

This is my 1000th blog post. ONE THOUSAND POSTS! No sooner did I come home from my mission than I was married, working, retiring and having my first baby. {Those things really did happen in hyper-speed!} Talmage was just a few months old when we moved to Cambridge and this blog was started in part as a way to share our European adventure with family and friends back in the states. Over the last seven years this space has served as a communication tool with family and friends, but it has also been an outlet for my soul, a travelogue of our life and adventures and a journal of all the amazing things my children have done and said. This blog has seen me through richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and if this is sounding a little like a marriage vow then you've got it because ask James, I'm a little married to this space! I've had four kids, I had a traumatic miscarriage, I've moved 11 times, I was a "law school widow" and a penny-pinching clerk's wife and now I'm treading through the big law lifestyle and through it all, this blog has been my sounding board. I hope that just as the words of missionary Heather touched my soul this week that the words on this blog will someday lift the spirits of a future Heather in need of a reminder of everything that she was, is and can be.

 "I know that I can never say that I'm the only one who's prayed for pain to end, or love to last, or for time not to go by so fast. But it will fly and in a hundred years from now, will there ever be someone who reads my name and wonders if I laughed? Or if I believed in Jesus? Or it my heart were ever broken? They may never understand what I go through but I will live the best that I know how for one big lifetime. It's not too much to ask of one good woman." --Cherie Call