For the joy
The past seven months we have taken on the daunting task of helping move my parents out of my childhood home. Sorting through each box and drawer has been equally beautiful as it has been difficult. Nonetheless, it has inspired me and Ryan to thoroughly sort through our own home. Over the past six years we have accumulated more medical paperwork than I have the stomach for but, with a working shredder, we finally tackled it. All in all, we ended with eleven bags of shredded documentation. Eleven bags of mail that I didn't want to open when it arrived. I reread every word, each written proof of the mountains we have journeyed together as a family. It was strangely emotional seeing it all in such a massive pile. God's grace found us in every sigh of relief and in every tear cried over those pages. Getting it out of our home had all the hallmarks of closing a chapter of our life and declaring a victory over each of those mountains. Something else we found in all those papers w