While cleaning out the garage:

Roy:  What are you going to do with those?
Miriam:  Throw them out.  (Roy saves everything.  I do not.)
Roy: I think you should go through them first.
Miriam:  Maybe.  I'll take the tote inside.

Five days later I open the box.  It is small tote, maybe 16x16x24.  When I open it some of the contents fall out on the floor and I pick one and start to read it.  A note from someone whose name I don't recognize.  She is writing to thank me for something I said at a conference in South Dakota at least ten years ago, maybe fifteen, maybe more.  Her words of gratitude touch me in deep places.  Anytime I think God has used me to change lives through my speaking I am amazed, and deeply moved.

The same card reminds me that I don't do that anymore.  I mean, I don't travel thirty weekends a year speaking.  A sharp pang of grief shoots through my stomach--and my soul--as I remember those days of excitement, airplanes, more invitations than I could accept, lovely hotels and applause--lots and lots of applause.

I continue to pull cards out of the tote, reading each one.  It takes three days to go through the entire box for I can only handle so many precious words at one sitting.  Slowly, very slowly the grief dissipates and is replaced by tenacious faith that the messages I used to preach about "seasons of life" have come home to roost in my own experience!

The transition from traveler to full-time caregiver has required the help of some godly friends who have held me, let me cry, express my questions.   I also have desperately needed, and received the wise words of a therapist who helps me make sense of my own questionable self.  Most of all, I have had the constant presence of a Heavenly Father who lets me crawl up on His lap and just cry it out.

"Why are you downcast, O my soul?  Why so disturbed with me?  Put your hope in God for I will yet praise Him."  Psalm 42:11

I take the box back to the garage and put it in the stack of things to keep.