99 and counting

It is New Year's Eve, 2013

This is my 99th blog.

It is not my 99th column - remember I used to write for Jacksonville.com and I think I probably have about 250 in that genre.  Besides if you count all the things I wrote for various and sundry church newsletters, I've been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing.

However, this is the 99th Sunshine and Shadows.  Tomorrow I will post 100.  It will be about  - you guessed it - resolutions.

Today's is  more about what happened in 2013.

This is not my year in review.  You can see that by looking at my Facebook page.  It only glazes the surface of what happened to me in 2013 - lots of fun and happy times with family and friends - and probably the highlight of 2013 - my mother's 90th birthday.

If you had told me just one year ago as we started planning the celebration that she would be living in Texas by today, I would have thought you were trying to write the best piece of fantasy fiction imaginable. 

I became my parents caregivers when they left the retirement community in St. Augustine to come back home to Jacksonville.  At first it was more us looking after each other, but as the years passed my role as the caregiver had become "what I did".  They moved in with me in 2005.  I was good with part time work and accepted the income they offered for what I was doing.

By mid 2013 - my mother, who really doesn't like to admit she needs a caregiver - and I, who needed the income - were stuck.

My mother was itching for some new opportunity.  She told me that she really wants to "finish well".  Surely there were more opportunities for her to serve the Lord - somewhere.

And I needed a change

My mother knew it; my siblings and my close friends knew it.  In time, my children knew it.

It really was time.

I made a bold statement.  "I need to  trust God with my finances" 

And my brother, Jonathan, issued an invitation.  Would mother come and live with him and his wife, Tammie?

In Texas.

I remember when my sister, Cindy and her husband, Robert, announced their move to Pensacola and that daddy kept saying "Pensacola?" and when my friend, Woody, told me that he had gotten a job in Cuba that I kept saying "Cuba?".

Three weeks ago tonight I pushed her wheelchair down that long corridor at JIA and sent my mother to live with our brother.

In Texas!

A few weeks before that night when I was volunteering at the front desk at Community Hospice's Hadlow Center when a person came for an interview for a part time temporary job in Community Relations.  I was really nosy.  What did the position entail? HUM.  I could do that job.  Like some sort of bird, I swooped in for the kill and got the job.  I feel only "this much" guilt.

So now every morning I go to work at Hospice and every afternoon I work on the 171st annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida or I write for Beson4.  This is the first time in what will soon be 13 years that I have only had Paula to think about.  It is very different.

But it is very good and I am grateful. 

"You can be sure that God will  take care of everything you need. . .".   Philippians 4:19 (The Message)

Oh and guess what - you know my friend, Woody, who moved to Cuba?  He's back! And my sister now lives in Sanford - much closer than Pensacola.