Sunny showers

I went to the bridal shower last weekend of one of my dearest mentors.

She was (and is!) absolutely beautiful.

I sat at a table with about seven other amazing women, all of them between four and forty years older than me.

There's some weekends where the sun is shining and I want nothing more than to be back in Daytona with my high school girlfriends. There's some Sunday mornings when I'm holding a child in the nursery and find myself missing my own baby sister terribly. Every holiday I'm stuck fighting off jealousy over the kids that are able to go back home to their families.

And then there's days like this.

Days when a woman who's known me less than a year introduces me as her "spiritual daughter".  When I sit with seven women who represent five continents they've lived in and have endless stories to tell. When thirty friends pray for a marriage and look to Christ as their first love. When the sun is shining, the humidity is low, the breeze is cool, and everything is just so perfect.

California has been hard - in some ways, harder than I ever imagined. Sometimes I find myself throwing my hands in the air and thinking "What am I doing here?"


Yet it has also been more beautiful and more giving and more healing than I could have ever asked.

Life is lovely.