La la la la life goes on! 🙂 Isn’t amazing that at any pinnacle moment in your life, you can feel framed in the setting, the emotion, the elation or the sorrow, frozen in this slither of past and present but you are uncertain how to move on into the future? And every now and then you can take a peak outside of your frame only to be shocked to see that life is going on around you unaware that you have stopped moving?
I’ve often felt this way when I’ve lost a loved one. It seems that when I’m deep in sorrow it is the hardest to move that foot forward into the future. I didn’t realize I would feel the same with an overwhelming amount of elation. So many friends and family have been contacting me and replying to my Facebook ‘media’ blitz it is humbling and just awesome. 🙂 I know they are so happy for me because I’ve been working on this particular project for years. Putting my life out there is what God has used to get me where I am today, (praise Him!), but this accomplishment, this pinnacle moment is so many mores years in the making.
Unable to grasp my own feelings I went into the Adoration chapel to thank God for bringing me the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I sat down and began to just pray ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you…’ over and over again. I felt the gratitude I could express couldn’t possibly capture the outpouring I wanted Him to receive. I then began to think about the many years I would beg an plead with Him to let my ‘break’ come and to be published. I just knew if I could get those stories out (these were some fiction Young Adult stories I wrote for teens in an effort to try and be an example to them through the written word) that I could somehow make a difference in this world.
That’s when the tears came, and the fullness of my truth was finally even revealed to me (how could I expect others to get it if I didn’t either??). I have always wanted to help, to reach out, to be a voice to be heard and stop the cycle. For 18 years I ‘ve felt this tug and to go back and view these years as a slide show of life bringing me to this point, it is… I can’t. I can’t find the words.
I thought World Youth Day was an amazing moment but for whatever reason (and probably one I can only understand) this is it.
When people tell me they bought more than one book because they know of a friend, sister or mother that has gone through similar circumstances in their life I want to cry tears of gratitude and then I say a prayer for every person that God leads to read the book. I finished my time in the chapel doing just that, praying. Praying for every single person who actually reads the book that God brings them into His embrace and that they feel the courage and strength to heal.
Blessings
Shannon