Live and learn, love and laugh: Beginnings,endings

Life is full of beginnings and endings, and most of them are bittersweet; some are definitely more sweet than others.

There's nothing as sweet as the smell of babies (can you tell lots of my friends are requesting cards for baby showers right now?) and as those sweet babies get older, the sleepless nights during those beginning weeks fade in our memories. (I found the cutest stamp of baby footprints that I incorporated into several new card designs this weekend. Frankly I'm still learning how to add pics to the blog, and am not exactly sure how I got this one inserted...!) For now, see more cards at http://www.riricreations.etsy.com/....

Those babies grow and moms (and dads) struggle with the lifelong process of the countless beginnings and endings of letting their babies go, step by step, through all the new stages and phases of starting school , then college, then even graduate work. The missing them is tempered by the missed one's excitement about his/her new adventures, sometimes far away~bittersweet indeed.

We (the adults, or "grown ups") have our own fits and starts in our own growing up. We explore beginning and endings in jobs, relationships, homes, and hobbies, in family and friends,as well as, if not most importantly, in and through our faith. At some point, we begin to settle into an ease that wasn't possible when we were younger (or maybe it just took me longer to get here than others :) We become more content with who we are, more steady in riding the currents of ups and downs, more ....(gosh, when I read that back to myself it sounds boring, but that's not what I meant at all!)

The Bible speaks to us of "joy" not as just an emotion, or feeling of happiness, but as an abiding state of being...I believe as we begin to dig deeper in discovering who God created us to be in the first place, we find, even inside ourselves, all kinds of "beginnings"...we get more comfortable in our own skin, which frees up a lot of emotional energy for us to be available to and more co-equal with others we relate to every day. You know you're in that sweet spot, when you wake up, excited to face the new day, almost every day, and go to bed exhausted, but fulfilled, having directed most of your time and energy and love and talents that day in the directions and ways that best use your unique time and energy, in the wonderfully "you-nique" way God intended for you to use them. Yes, there are daily bumps in the road, and "shoulda, coulda, woulda" thoughts along the way, but at the end of the day: When you know you are loved by the first and best Father, whose love for us and commitment to us begins anew every day and never, ever ends...well, living in that knowlege, is the best way to begin and end, every day.