June 26, 2013. I had started writing that spring, writing down Dad’s stories. I didn’t know then that they would one day become a book. I had no plan for that. I had no idea. It unfolded, one day at a time, page by page.

Our time together at the cabin on Washington Island, or at the condo in Milwaukee, or waiting for doctors’ appointments or hanging out in the ER, or hospital rooms provided the quiet and space to think, to watch, to listen. To bake. A cake. From scratch. On my mom’s 1950’s Sunbeam mixer. It’s in the basement now, in a box. What do I do with that?

The cabin is sold and I’m the one who now sometimes wears that orange cap. I keep it because it’s a part of Dad, I keep the mixer because it’s a part of Mom. But I know the day is coming when I will have to let all these things go. How do you do that..? I don’t know… other than, we let the cabin go, and I was okay.

I let mom go, she wasn’t mine to keep. I clung to Dad until the nurse said, you have to let him go. I did, and I was okay, in time. I realize that this is why I write. It’s the one thing that allows me to connect so completely with the Eternal, and to all that I have had to let go of and to all that I know I have yet ahead of me to let go of.

I can hold onto it all through my words because God’s Eternal Word lives in me. That mustard seed, so tiny, grows and grows to become the largest tree in God’s Kingdom.

He doesn’t ask anything more of us than that, only to let a seed of love be planted within us. He will water it, He will prune it, He will throw His light over it, and day by day, page by page, it becomes the largest love imaginable. The most beautiful thing of all.