Making me think about stuff

Tonight, Sydney was picking up some of her toys to take upstairs, and she and I were just sorta walking and talking as we headed to her room. While we we talked, she just nonchalantly said, "It's so easy being me."

Wow! Isn't that an attitude more of us need to have?

How often do we stop and think that it's easy to be me?; that I like who I am; that life is good, and really not as complex as we sometimes make it out to be, that sometimes we just make it more difficult than it's really supposed to be.

Sometimes things should just be good, and we should be able to say, "I like who I am...I like where I'm at...it's really not so bad being me."

Sure, you say, that's easy to say. But not so easy to do.

Well, I say this, not as a Pollyanna/everything is always perfect sort of person. I actually say this in the throes of some things that have made me really sad in the last couple of days.

I've been dealing lately with the knowledge that my Grandma Sloan will probably not live much longer. She has become a shell of the woman she once was...the woman who used to feed me the best crowder peas you can imagine, excitedly shared with me the newest acquisition she'd made to her doll collection, let me help her make her delicious german chocolate cake, told me stories of how God spoke to her, and beat me at Scrabble. She's now in a nursing home, unable to take care of herself, forgetting why she's even there.

And that breaks my heart.

Then, I just found out that a friend from church...who was younger than I am...had passed away. Her family sent me this notice about her death: "Andrea Kornegay Smith passed away last night after a long and sometimes painful fight with ovarian cancer. She is survived by her husband, Davi, and her daughter, Rebecca, her mother, father, step-mother, sister, an large extended family. She will be missed greatly by all knew her."

Andrea played Bunko with me; she was a young woman with a wonderful laugh and a special panache in wearing stylish wigs and hats; and her daughter, Rebecca, is just five-years-old.

As I thought about Andrea's losing battle with cancer, I was struck most by the sadness that must have gripped her as she realized that she wouldn't see her little girl grow up, go to junior high, get married someday.

But how even more overwhelming it must have been to know that she'd miss the bubbles, and the picnics, and the frosting fingers, and the pillow fights, and the giggles, and all the insightful things that five-year-olds always end up saying to you.

Things like, "It's so easy being me."

I'm not really even sure how those two things go together...how Sydney's insightful words go together with sadness and grief and uncertainty.

I'm thinking that it means something, though. I think it's God way of telling me (through Sydney, as He often has a way of doing) that life is a big ole mixture of jumbled up emotions and feelings, and disappointments and triumphs, and losses and victories, and tears and laughter.

That it's not just one or the other...it's the death of a friend, alongside the easygoing contentment of a child.

And that, because life is so short and so fragile, that we should take hold of it by the reins. We should take every opportunity to live it the way we know we need to--and God wants us to--as if knowing it was our last opportunity to do so.

And that sometimes we just need to breathe a little and just enjoy being.

I'm not really even sure if that makes any sense to any of you as I write this late on a Tuesday evening (almost Wednesday morning); I'm not sure it totally makes sense to me. All I can say is...thank goodness, yet again, for Sydney's openness to say what's on her heart. Because it, invariably, touches my own.