Bitter sweet life

Linking up again with The Gypsy Mama with her 5 minute Fridays for a bit of fun!!

Around here we write for five minutes flat on Fridays. We write because we love words and the relief it is to just write them without worrying if they’re just right or not. So we take five minutes on Friday and write like we used to run when we were kids.

1. Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking

2. Link back here and invite others to join in.

3. Please visit the person who linked up before you & encourage them in their comments.

OK, are you ready? Give me your best five minutes on: Ache

Mama and daddy's hands, Christians memorial, and Baby #2

I look at this picture, and it is bitter sweet. The picture with my two babies. One kicking, alive (though I couldn't feel it at the time) and the other with Jesus, the bracelet with me as a memory of his short life. It was an accident that the stones facing out in that picture are garnet, January, my baby's birth month. It's a beautiful picture, with more meaning than meets the eye. But it isn't an easy picture.

Is that the way life is, though? The sweet and the bitter mixed together in a single cup. It's a good drink, but a hard drink. The way that when Jesus died on the cross for my sins, taking my own punishment on himself, it was both sweet and bitter. Sweet, because his great love for me, to choose to do such a thing for a complete, ugly sinner. Bitter, because the death, the torture, was hard and ugly. And he, God, hung there.

It must be life is that way, with those moments so mixed together. The joy and the heartbreak captured in a single moment, a single breath, a single picture, so that it is hard to see where one begins and the other ends. I'm sure I'll feel that way when I see my little one; the joy of moments with my baby and the eagerness to see what comes next, but the bitter sweet knowledge that the only thing I'll have left of the moments as they pass is a beautiful memory and pictures.