A New Day

   I try to get up each morning and be grateful for a new day. Some days that does not happen. I am finding the more I focus on each new day as a gift from God it is easier to settle in and be thankful for being alive. It's sort of off to think I could not be aware of life as worthy of gratefulness. I have so much to be thankful for in so many ways. I know people who have daily pain and physical suffering and it is not a cake walk. So why would I be so blatantly unthankful with what I have received ? One of my struggles is a great loss I continue to live through. I am coming up on the anniversary of my young and precious 22 year old  son's death. No one is ready to lose a child and it is a hard thing to accept and adjust to. God is gracious and has shown me much in this process of losing and grieving . 
       I hated new days after he died for a long time . I hated that life could go on and that I could survive when my son was no longer here. How could this be so? How could God expect me to keep living? Why would my heart keep beating? How is that possible? But it did and it does. We are at five years this December, just after Christmas. Just when you are settling in to get ready to ring in the New Year, bring in more " New Days ". No one really knows what a new day will bring , or for that matter , what the ending of a new day will bring. I certainly didn't ! We certainly didn't ! And then the call ! And here is where the world and time should stop, and did stop for me and my family. Stop it did, as well as keep moving . How is it that can happen? If God had not kept days coming and going it would not be doable. But he did and he told me as I reached the hospital and found out that my precious boy had taken his own life and lay behind the same curtain right in that same emergency room where my very own mom had been behind just two months before and took her last breaths , He, God almighty , said to my deepest need, Life is for Living and I want to live it! 
  No one can tell me it was not from God ! No one ! Why would a thought that dramatic come to the mind of a mother who just found out her precious son has just , within the last hour , shot and killed himself ? So a new day has arrived again for me and for you as well , because you are reading this . I had to decide each new day what I would do with what I had left . I still have to choose as do you ? So what are we going to chooses. I choose life and living and gratefulness at life beyond the grave. I choose Jesus and growing beyond the grave. 
  Matthew 14:29 says : So Peter got out of the boat,started walking on the water , and came towards Jesus .   I am placing my name in there now and I am choosing to get out of the boat and am going towards Jesus .