Today I Will Choose Joy

Regrets are like eating rat poison expecting the rats to die. Rather than living with regrets, we can choose to savor every opportunity to love. This is how my yesterday felt (feels).

When my niece was in 8th grade she went to live with her dad and step-mother. She will be 52 on her next birthday. I feel like one year ago she came back into my life and my world is so much richer because we are here now. Her mom passed in January.

As we were planning her day here with us we decided to leave options open, and yesterday she drove over from Ann Arbor area to spend the day. We had a glorious day. Each moment was precious. There was ample time for both tears and laughter….

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Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I will share a set of photos that gives you a clear sense of our day. The first is a close up of a banner (had been a favorite of her mom) our niece gifted to my sister after her mom had passed. It now hangs over the massage table for clients to see above them. It says: Today I Will Choose Joy.

The challenge became how to get a photo that showed clearly it was on the ceiling above the table, so the fun began in earnest. Here is my niece on the floor and my sister at the foot of the massage table each trying to get a shot….

Then I had the idea for all three of us to get on the massage table and take a selfie which sounded plausible until we realized the banner was backwards!

One last try resulted in total failure to get the banner but we captured a beautiful memory of the three of us.

We drove by my niece’s childhood home, her elementary school, the fields where she played ball, and the former home of her her maternal grandma and grandpa. All of our sharing and shenanigans put us driving by the home of her paternal great grandma and great grandpa at the exact time a man was crossing the road to get his mail. “That’s a relative!” she burst out. Soon I was turning the van around and she spent precious time with the cousin who had grown up with being called a twin to her father.

As we headed back to the house to meet the guys, we marveled at the holy timing of our being there to see him. We had made two calls asking about an impromptu visit with a couple of folks, but both had declined. It probably took him all of two minutes to come out and walk across the yard. The exact two minutes that we were creeping by….

Earlier in the day as she had gotten close to our house a car almost side-swiped her on a road heavy with memories. She told us she had said out loud, “Nice try, Devil dog, not this time. You lose, I get to choose.”

My niece shared with us how she would give her testimony as evidence that painful things (awful things) can (and did) happen to us but the holy love of Jesus carried us through and we can look back and see that we were carried. She said the day could not have turned out any better.

And as the three of us posed for this photo on our porch, words from my sister’s text message this morning say it all: “Yesterday was one of the most wonderful days of my life.”