Resilience

Kids are resilient. My previous post described the cute little bunny that Caroline and her friend rescued from the basement window well several weeks ago.

Caroline just adored this creature; each morning she'd waken earlier than most children during summer vacation and stroke, feed, pamper, and coddle her new bunny. But as nature would dictate, one morning after I'd returned home from running errands, Caroline's countenance said it all: The bunny died.

She had told me how she found the poor creature, and how she even tried to revive it by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation through a straw. Poor child. I pictured her using a straw in a vain attempt to breathe life into this creature; her efforts, unfortunately, were useless. Her tears fell hard, and even though I never really wanted that rabbit in the first place, it was very difficult for me to swallow the lump that formed in my own throat. My eyes watered slightly, not because of the rabbit's death, but because of the effect the rabbit's life had had on my daughter.

But she buried the bunny in the back yard, and Mystie, our dog continues to sniff that area and is at a loss as to what could possibly be there.

Now, weeks later, the bunny is a distant memory in Caroline's mind. Her focus has returned to where it had been before the bunny ever came into her life, namely, her time with friends, playing her guitar, and teaching her puppy silly tricks.

I'm sure that she will always remember the bunny that she rescued from the window well, and how she held it and tried to keep it alive. For more than a week, her love overflowed onto that little creature, and even though it's gone, her memories of Thumper will most likely linger for years, if not for the rest of her life.

And you know, I don't think that I'll soon forget it either. It made me realize how something so seemingly insignificant can impact a little girl forever.

A Choice

Childhood Love. As a child, I remember feeling the love from my parents, mostly springing up from something as basic as their smiles, the kind that made you feel like they loved you just the way you were.

Teenage love. Oh, how wonderful and yet, at the same time, how awful that love felt to me. A new crush on a boy often led to countless hours of daydreaming, my own heart racing uncontrollably when he would simply enter the classroom, and then the waiting for his much-coveted phone call. Sometimes the call came, sometimes it didn't. Eventually, the feelings faded, along with the immature love.

Marriage love. Now this is, without a doubt, the most challenging of all loves. I have learned to fully appreciate and put my trust in a saying that's stuck in my brain:

"Sometimes love is not a feeling. It's a choice."

These past few months, I have had to rely on the above statement more than I'd like to. There have been times when I'd question a lot of things about my relationship. Divorce was never an option, but I can understand how some people end up in that place. Sometimes, love is nothing more than a choice that we make in order to make the marriage work. Maybe a better way to say it is that there are times in everyone's marriage when we choose to keep loving, even though we don't feel like loving that person. Not one single bit. But we do it because we've made the choice to do it. There's not any other option.

In the long run, making the choice to love someone prevails over our immediate feelings. Feelings come and go, but choosing to love when it's the last thing we are feeling, takes much more effort. And patience. And time.

In the long run, love lasts. Feelings don't.

Love is sometimes a choice. A hard choice. There are times when choosing to love is so very difficult, almost impossible, but at the same time, when I choose to love, it turns out to be the right choice.

(This post is dedicated to Debby, whose post I just read reminded me of the saying above. Blessings to you and Tim, Debby).

We Could Learn A Lot From a Dog

This picture made me smile. In case it's difficult for you to view, it's a photo of a mother dog nursing her five puppies. Nothing too unusual about that except that an orphaned squirrel needed a home and was subsequently "adopted" by this caring mamma dog. According to the captions, the baby squirrel nurses right alongside the pups, sleeps with them, and even plays with them at intervals throughout the day.

I'm amazed because relationships like this don't happen every day, at least they don't occur in my little world. I have to admit that there are times when I could be a little more compassionate, or show more patience towards others. As much as I try, there are days when I just want to get my errands completed. Just today, as I pushed my grocery cart around the aisles of the store, I'd found myself at a standstill as the little old man - probably close to 80 years old - stopped in front of me, leaned in closely to a shelf to examine a particular item, and in the process, created a cart jam. I couldn't move forward, and the people coming from the opposite direction couldn't squeeze past the old man. He didn't even know that I was there, standing patiently by my cart, trying to appear polite, and hoping that he'd find the box of cereal he was searching for and move on. I wanted him to move on quickly so that I could get back to my errands and my world. This guy was disrupting my pace, and I was getting annoyed.

I could learn a lot from this mamma dog. She not only accepted this little squirrel into her brood, but she took the time to nurse it, to coddle it and to allow it to be part of her family. She didn't push it aside, although she could have done so and no one would have blamed her for it. I, on the other hand, had figuratively pushed the little old man from my "path," and I did so because I was the one in a hurry and I was the one being selfish. Impatience. Why are we inclined to be so impatient sometimes?

The old man finally found what he was looking for, placed the box tenderly into his cart, and pushed his cart forward, never realizing that there were at least three other people trying to get through that aisle but were halted as they, too, waited for him to move on. I smiled, though, as he went on his way. I smiled because he never saw the impatient looks on the faces of the others in that grocery aisle. And I hope that if I reach the ripe old age of that man, others will allow me to pass along at my own pace, too, and that I'll not see the impatience written all over their faces. That mamma dog didn't cast out another creature simply because it didn't fit in with her agenda or her own pace.

We could learn a lot from a dog.