Other worlds to sing in...

February...our least favourite month of the year....we are in the lead-up to our sad anniversaries and, as is normally the case, the time leading up to the anniversary, is normally worse than the anniversary day itself.  We've both been a bit "on the edge" this week....

On 10th February, it will be 15 years since Ben died
On 12th February, it will be 5 years since Karena died.

Neither of us can believe the amount of time that has passed - it seems like yesterday, and yet at the same time, it seems like a lifetime away since those horrors.
So many memories.

I'm reading a book by Rob Parsons at the moment called "The Wisdom House" and it's just brilliant....chapters are short and very easy to read with great nuggets of wisdom within the pages.  I read a chapter this week called "Other worlds to sing in" which made me cry (I just read it to Ellie and it made her cry too!)  Here's a quote from it about the calendar of our life :-

"The one I use is made up of boxes, and each has a date written above it.  Every day I am pulled from one box into another...at one second past midnight, I am pulled through a door into the next box - and for the next 24 hours my life will be played out within its walls.  If I am foolish, or simply too preoccupied to reflect, I can believe that there is an endless supply of boxes waiting for me.  But there is not. And for that reason I must try to live my life in the present box, grasping the preciousness of this moment.  And this is vital, for although we may find it hard to grasp our own mortality...there is a last box. And this one has no doors that can lead me into the next day.  The biggest question in the universe is this : does that last box have no doors because it is just a coffin and death is the end ?  Or does it have no doors because death is a beginning and that particular box, unlike all the others....has no walls ?"

CS Lewis says it like this :-
"But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page:now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read : which goes on forever : in which every chapter is better than the one before" (The Last Battle)

I remember reading this to my daughter just after her mum died.  Great stuff in the midst of the pain of the journey!

Here's a photo of the house extension....things are progressing well but slowly !