6 AM on a Sunday morning.

Last night I got a terrible throbbing headache and a bunch of nauseas. I was really awful not very common I get anything. Was wondering what I ate.

So went to bed early, hoping just to make it all go away.

And so I woke at about 3 in the morning. I tried to go back to sleep but kept having wierd dreams that J and I lived in a hovel of an apartment with leaky pipes and newspaper spray painted to the walls and teenagers tipping 40's of 8ball outside my window. Yeesh. I sat on the couch and tried to think how I got back there. I say back, because I thought my days of living in dumps were over.

So I got close to the person next to me and looked up out that window at that cloudy sky early morning Sunday sky of August when everything was all silent. All that was there was a tall cedar from our backyard against the grey. Standing at his usual tall, maybe he too just waking up. Or maybe not.

This week, after our house being on the market for a very long time, dangling in a way, me to start a new job, us needing to move, the offer on our house fell through.

Everyone who comes through this house says how nice it is. It's hard not to say "So then buy it, &*%$!"

I didn't think much about this scenario, aside from being a little bummed, but then as I layed there and stared at this tree against the silent cloudy august early morning sunday sky in bed next to J, I started to feel that sense of how unbelievably fragile everyone's lives are. Maybe more so since I now have 2 people that I value so much, and I know that in truth, there is just so very very little we control or have influence over about our own lives. I felt pretty powerless to protect/help or otherwise do anything good for the only things that are valuable to me. And isn't that just life?

That whole notion of just how excruciatingly little we control in life, and how the stakes are so high for us...we have no other option but to let go or go mad trying trying trying.

We do not control who our parents are, where we are born, how much money we had as we grew up, how much money we have now (for the most part), our mental makeup, our heritage, our legacy, our children, our leaders, our planet, our birth or our death. Whether we drive across a bridge and it crashes down on us crushing our family (! ack! just kidding! sort of!) And there are a bunch of other things we don't control either, those are just the first I can think of.

We do control um, what job we have (sort of), what we wear (sort of, unless we are poor), how we speak, how we treat others, our choices of good or bad, our integrity, what spouse we choose (sort of in some places), our habits, how we spend our time, or whether we choose not to destroy our own life or another (and how we do it)...

When I look at these options, it seems to me that this is perfect design by God to show a person what is important, and what isn't as much...or maybe, what is important to Him.

Still the frailness of life combined with the quantity of love in a mom's heart is a reality cocktail, to be sure. I don't think God meant anyone to dwell on it too much. But it is there, in the background as we go along, wondering whether we are going to buy this or that, deluding ourself about how much control we really do have.

I have no really good way to end off here, but that it is going to be a beautiful day, and I will spend more time with the people I love and try to sell my house some more...