He Makes All Things New

On Sunday we went home from church to eat lunch and then headed back out to play on Rachel's Playground.  I don't go there very often after services when all the other kids are playing.  I thought it would be so awesome watching other kids play and have fun there - and it is... but it's also extremely painful and so I just avoid it. 

Asa took a ride with Daddy down his sister's slide for the first time.  It's so strange to me that she's really gone, that we really built a playground... and that she really has a little brother.  The past two years have been a fog. 

We left and went to clean up the broken glass at her grave.  It was really nice out.  Isaiah yelled "look what I found!" and I seriously thought it was a craft from another grave, but nope, it was a real bird's nest on her grave. 

Then we noticed the buds on the lilac tree behind Rachel's stone...

We started clearing the stones that were in the jar that broke and underneath them, the beginning of the tulips we planted back when I was 9 months pregnant with Asa...

A song came to mind that says this:

I am full of earth - you are heavens worth  

I am stained with dirt - prone to depravity

You are everything that is bright and clean  

the antonym of me  - you are divinity

But a certain sign of grace is this:

From the broken earth flowers come up pushing through the dirt

We walked (my first walk since cracking my knees!) up to my Uncle and Nana's grave where we found more tulips pushing up through the broken ground.  Everywhere we looked, spring was there... new life. 

Last fall, I threw hard round colorless bulbs into the ground.  They endured the cold, barren winter and are finally pushing their way from the broken earth, thru the dirt - and will eventually bloom beautifully.  I showed the kids all the new life around us and just kept saying "He makes everything new" and as I did, the truth of that lifted my soul because I know my little girl, just like those flowers, didn't stay below that dirt.  I know her brokenness, my brokenness, has and will continue to push through the dirt and bloom.

He makes all things new...  that verse is buried with her - and it's hidden in my heart.  She had an amazing purpose on this earth and I'm never going to stop sharing it.  Sometimes it's so profound, I can't even put it into words.  I went home and saw this on my calendar (Remember the last time this happened?  I swear this calendar was created for me by God himself!!)

It says "God created each flower with wonderful precision and every life with a beautiful purpose"

And in the background?  A bleeding heart. ♥