Grieving No More

"The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief -
But the pain of grief is only a shadow
When compared with the pain of never risking love."
~Hilary Stanton Zunin

A friend of mine reminded me it was OK to grieve.  But the thing is, I have grieved for over half a year.  Most of 2013 wasted trying to get back what I lost.  I grieved for a relationship that is no more.  The "we" that we were is gone; never to return no matter how many tears I shed or how many hours on my knees I spent praying.  I grieved for the person I was.  A huge part of me is gone.  The part of me that believed in Christmas magic and happily ever after.  The person that would watch sappy Hallmark movies with tears in her eyes knowing that I had found my fairy tale and it was even better than the movies.  I grieved for the Olan Mills family pictures that would never be.  The family cookouts and birthday parties and the white picket fence.

But I'm done grieving.  I'm not going to spend the last month of this crappy year crying.  I don't know that I'm ready to move forward in any way yet, but I can't live in the past any longer.  Nothing I can do could bring back my life as I knew it before June.  It took something as a new pair of jeans to finally give me the closure I needed.  It took someone reminding me that if I didn't forgive, it was one of the worst sins I could commit because God gives me his mercy every day.

And I forgave.  Wayne for not loving me the way I needed and for walking out of my life.  The family members that turned their backs on me when I needed them the most.  But most of all - I forgave myself.  For putting my heart and soul into a man that threw it away.  For not trusting that God had a bigger plan for me and wasn't ready to unveil it yet.  For not seeing the precious gifts I had in my children.  For not cherishing the absolutely incredible friends I still have and the blessed angels that have come into my life since then. 

So, I don't shed tears for the past anymore.  I don't have dreams for the future.  What I have is the knowledge of a promise that God will make this all work out in the end.  Whether it's because of destiny or just because I plowed away at it until it worked.  I can't say I even have hope.  But I have prayers.  And I know that somehow, someway those are going to get to the big man and He's going to answer in His own way.  Until then, I'm going to continue to be still and try to hear whatever message I am supposed to be getting from all of this.  And maybe - just maybe - a stray Christmas snowflake will hold just enough Christmas magic to bring the spark back again.