Why Roses?

There is nothing and everything (at the same time) spectacular about my life.  We are a normal family.  My husband and I got married after we met in college.  We both followed our dream of becoming teachers.  We started working in and around the community we lived in right after we graduated.  We decided we wanted to have children.  We were blessed with three beautiful children.  In the midst of that perfection that literally smelled like roses {all the time} tragedy rocked our world.  We have experienced the most unbelievable moments of joy while days later we've lived the most heartbreaking tragedy.

In a previous post I wrote about how before this tragedy I smelled roses every time I walked outside and I saw rainbows after every storm.  I never thought anything bad would happen, at least not like this.  I guess the perfectly written story in my head was too loud.  In just a short time after we delivered our third child, Charlie, Satan took away all of the rose colored glasses.  He wrecked my life in the most horrifyingly awful and painful way.  We lost Charlie just 17 days after he was born.  This is from the post I wrote about living life in the after.  

"Every single part of the after is hard in its own way but right now for every one else, Charlie is a memory.  He is a "sad memory from last summer that wrecked the Gesenhues'."  For me, he is my baby.  The moments of extreme grief, guilt, frustration, sadness, and anger still rise up.  The after will never be like before when I saw rainbows every afternoon.  But as hard as it is I'm ok with it because when I do smell the faint scent of a flower I cherish it and when I see a rainbow after the rain I stare at it and remember the promise of perfection in heaven.  What joy we will have when we finally get to walk those streets of gold."  

My hope as I continue to use this blog as therapy to make it through the bad days is that I recognize that there are good days.  I can still smell roses even though the storms may have seemingly washed out the garden.  They didn't.  They couldn't.  My God is bigger than those storms.  I can be certain that as we begin again on Rossford in our new home I will start smelling the sweet fragrance of roses again.