We Boast in HOPE of the Glory of God

I want to apologize right off the bat for the length of this post!

Of course it is Sunday, I have had a very powerful day with insights about this journey we have begun.  I will start at the beginning, a very good place to start :)

I woke up this morning in a bit of a fog.  Viv is so active and seems to move with my every movement at night so sleeping is not always as rejuvenating as it should be.  As I started moving, my mind went back in time to when I was a missionary in Atlanta.  One morning I had a very powerful prayer experience that I often have pondered through the years wondering exactly what it meant.  During this reflection, I met Christ in a stadium full of people.  He looked at me, and without saying a word, I knew He wanted my heart.  Not like, oh Christ wants my heart to love Him, blah, blah, blah, He PHYSICALLY wanted my heart.  I knew this would be a painful process and I looked at Him and said, "No way.  You can't have it.  It is going to hurt so bad--I don't want that pain."  Still silent, He reached into my chest and grabbed out my heart. "OUCH!" I yelled back at Him.  But He still didn't respond.  He simply raised my heart similar to the priest raising the host at the Consecration, and started breaking it, passing it to the people sitting in the stadium.  With each tear and pass, I felt a slight twinge, but knew I had no control.  After my heart was gone from His hands and passed among the people in the stadium, baskets filled with the left overs of my heart were sitting at my feet.  At this moment, Christ looked at me and said, "I will always give you what you need.  They all needed YOU."

This morning, this experience made some sense to me.  The journey Rod and I are on with Viv, is part of vocation.  God is using me, using him, using Viv for all these people.  I don't understand it all in this moment, but I know at some point my heart being ripped out of my chest for those around me will make sense.

Our friend shared a story with me yesterday that has made an impact on my heart.  She is a scientist and works in a lab with many people from many walks of life.  When she received the news about Vivian, another colleague could see she was upset.  After explaining the situation to her colleague, her colleague looked at her and said without hesitation, "Well of course the baby should be aborted.  Might as well stop the suffering now."  When I heard this, I was mortified.  Why would I kill my child? So she has a heart defect-not a death threat.  It hurt my heart to hear this easy response from someone.  It really opened my eyes to the need for love in our world more than ever before.  It hurts to think that killing my baby would be the answer to this.  I just see it as a challenge--one that is going to strengthen our family.

I always take my Word Among Us to Mass.  I am SO ADD, that if I can't follow along with the readings, who knows what is happening.  The one thing that gets my goat is when the readings read at Mass aren't the ones in my WAU.  Its then you have to shuffle through the missal if there is one in the pew, if not then you start thinking 'I knew I should have gotten one before I walked in' and then before you know it's the Consecration and the priest is giving you the final blessing.  Well, God showed me today.  It was the day when this very thing happened.  However, God gave me a special verse that sums up Rod and my heart for during this journey.  It comes from St. Paul's letter to the Romans.  In Romans 5:2, Paul says, "we boast in the hope if the GLORY OF GOD!"  Yes my friends, we do boast in the hope of the Glory of God!  This verse is my new tag line--this is how my heart feels.  Viv already is a Glory story, and will continue to share this Glory with us as her life unfolds.