My favorite subjects are my God, my husband, and my kids. Our lives are simple. We live in the moment. But like Platos cave or like the Matrix, we recognize that what we see simply is a shadow of what is.
The kids finish soccer camp today. This weekend we have church and we pack to go see my folks in Kansas Monday. It will be a lengthy two-day trip to get there. While there, we plan to celebrate a b-day for Lukas at a park with some other kids. The theme is to be pirates.
But before we leave, Ernie has a medical consultation about the identity of a cyst he recently had removed.
Life is full of blessings, full of grace and mercy, but it also contains much pain, pain that reminds us we were meant for another life, pain that helps us to be more fit for that life if we allow God to work in that pain. He breaks us, He breaks our illusions, so that greater reality can spill forth.

Water confined in a vessel, warm, wet, stale, moistens the tips of fingers, long, tapered, pale.
The vessel struck, is broken, water flowing free, soaking skirt and bodice, saturating me.
Water cools with breezes, light, lifting winds, evaporating, rising. I feel alive again.

Released and spreading substance renews, makes good, accomplishes a giving, the captured never could.