Huggin Necks…
June 29, 2007
Last night my brother in law and his son flew in, and tonight my sister in law and the other two boys are flying in… To say that I am excited would be an understatement (well, that would be on the inside, on the outside I am really run down and tired today) This vacation was planned before I found out I had cancer… before, we were going to go spend the week in a seasonal rental house in Orlando and go to the amusement parks… but plans change. I am just glad to be able to hug their necks!
They will be here until July 5th. We don’t have anything planned (except Tuesday, Mark, Jeff and the kids have rented a charter to go fishing). The 4th we will probably grill at home and then go to the beach and watch the fireworks…. Did I mention that I was excited?!
So bear with me if I don’t post everyday, I am enjoying my family!
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Comments
Note From Heather: All comments are welcome, but I reserve the right to delete at any time. All comments are solely the opinions of the individuals submitting them and the publication of them on this blog does not imply my endorsement or agreement. By posting your comments to the blog you are granting me the right to use them. Your submission of a comment constitutes your acceptance of this comment policy.
In other words: Play Nice
63 Responses to “Huggin Necks…”
I would love to hear from you!
Please don’t apologize. We will be praying fervently for you to have a firework of a time with family!!
we love you, Heather!!!
Leigh
Wonderful. I love enjoying family time! Have lots and lots of fun.
Always good to have time off — no need to apologize.
Enjoy the hugs and the time off!
Being together is much more important than WHERE you’re going to be. Hug a bruise on them and smooch blisters on them. Soak up those memories, girl!
Have the best visit ever! ;-)
Love and hugs,
Diane
We will miss hearing from you…but enjoy this time and have lots of fun with your family! Prayers in California will still be coming your way.
Have fun this week, we will definetly miss hearing from you everyday. Enjoy yourself, you deserve it.
Heather, enjoy your time with family, you deserve some “huggin neck” time!
I hope you have a wonderful time together. My prayers will with you for a wonderful visit with your family.
family is wonderful..enjoy!
I’m glad your family is coming in and you have some time “off”. You have fun, and don’t worry about us, we’ll be here when you get back. :)
JoAnn
Yay! Nothing like a lot of family to love on you!
Have a wonderful visit! Enjoy yourself and enjoy your family!
I agree … No apology necessary. Do all the neck huggin’ you can fit in to your family visit. Yippee!
Take it easy and we will be patient.
Love & Prayers,
Betty G. (Oklahoma)
blue.eagle@cox.net
You just take all the time you need to enjoy your family! That’s exactly how it should be!!! Treasure your time and make many new memoires! Hug away…
Have fun and if you want to come swim in a bigger pool, let me know. ;)
Heather, visit with your family, sweetheart. I guess I will be alright not hearing from you a couple of days(smile).
You are in my heart and Prayers everyday!!!!!!!
I have a special Prayer request, I want you to help me Pray about.
Love and Hugs
Erlene
heather,
i will be in town. i don’t want to disrupt your time with your family, but would love to come by and hug your neck and maybe bring a meal to all of you.
please email me!!!
xoxo,
karly
FAMILY! Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. And thanks be to God for them!
Thanks for the update; we would have worried if we hadn’t heard from you in a few days. Sit, relax, and enjoy the company : )
*wink* you deserve it girl! Enjoy!
Dear Heather…Bear with you if you don’t post everyday?
Why there is so much reading to do in your blog, we will never be lost for something good to read!
Enjoy your family and we are looking forward to some nice “family” pictures….Love Terry
I keep hearing this country song that reminds me of you. It is about a wife who has cancer and loses her hair. About them going to church and the husband thinking he was stronger then her before they had come together. Then after her cancer he knew she was the strong one. I wish I knew the name of it. Anyone? I think about you and pray for you ever time I hear it.
family… nothing like ‘em. have fabulovely time with everyone! we’ll be chillin’ out and keeping busy until you pop back in on us…
Your BIL & SIL are almost my neighbors. I’m one hour south of them on Highway 71. Enjoy your visit with them!
Enjoy your family, Heather. Hope you have a terrific weekend.
Enjoy your family! Life is all about those precious moments with your family. My sister and niece have been here the past week and it flew by! Now, I am off to Atlanta to spend three weeks with my family! Enjoy yourself and relax! Take care Heather! :)
i’m sure they are happy to hug your neck too! enjoy your time together.
Good for you!! Enjoy your family, and have a blast!
You deserve it! Enjoy your family!
Have a wonderful time with your family………your in my prayers.
Blessings Lori
Heather, you don’t have to post everyday. Just rest and enjoyed having your family there.
Have a wonderful time. :) I’ll still be prayin’ no matter what!
Awesome! I’m glad you get to spend some time with them. Have fun!
Oh family is so wonderful- I miss mine very much (especially since we are an ocean apart!). Enjoy and savor every moment- God bless you! :)
Well hello there,
I found your blog while blog hoppoing and I just wanted to say that you are an amazing person and I will add you to my prayer list. I am speechless right now after reading about Emma’s story so please forgive my lack of words now. I will be back though.
Love to you sister in Christ,
Misi
Don’t apologize. Enjoy the time with your family.
Sounds like bliss! Have a wonderful time with family- it will be so good for you!
xo
Heather -
I just discovered your blog, and wanted to let you know that you, Emma, and the family will be in our prayers. Thank you so much for sharing - you are an amazing woman!
Family time is awesome, enjoy it and make sure you let them love on you :-)
Have lots of fun with your family! I haven’t even thought about the 4th. We are just trying to unpack.
Go have some fun! Enjoy your family being there. :-)
Hi Heather,
It’s been a while since I’ve comented on your blog. My internet was down for a time and before I got satellite internet, I couldn’t visit. I just wanted to let you know that me and my family have uplifted you in prayer daily, and it is so good to hear that you are doing well and praising God all the way. I hope that you enjoy your time with your family while their here.
God Bless,
Lori
Have a wonderful time with your family Heather.
Love in Christ,
Theresa
Nothing better than hugs! Enjoy!!
Have the biggest and best time with your family. God is so good to us.
Prayers for extra strength while they are there. Christy
Dear Heather…Have a blessed Sunday..Love Terry
You deserve a break from blogging! You’ve amazed us with your faith, honesty, and even with being able to blog through it all! We’ve grown to love you, so much more than you will ever know. And so, I’ve awarded you the Rockin’ Girl Blogger award. Which you’ve probably been awarded hundreds of times over already. But I still think you deserve it. I hope you’ll accept it. Go on over to my little blog and copy your award.
have a wonderful time! :) you deserve it!!! Enjoy the break.
I’m thrilled for you! Fabulous quality time with those that you love best! Nothing beats that!
There is nothing like having “family” around especially when we are not feeling well or need support. Enjoy your family and let them “take care” of you. Happy 4th.
Enjoy!
Hi Heather! Stop by my blog when you get a chance. There is a little something there for you. :)
Meg
We are enjoying you enjoying them! Play on!
Because of Jesus, Bobbie
Heather, I’m finding that my days are not complete until I have read your insights.
I am sooo happy for you! THIS is what’s important…your family! How much they value you is evident by their happily changing vacation plans to be sure you are still a central part of the celebration! Indeed, you are blessed. I know that you KNOW that. Take the time to enjoy this time to the max. I am praying that you will feel strong and healthy during this very special time together with your loved ones.
I’ve taken the liberty to paste a blog from Sister Janet Fearns, of Vatican Radio. Her website is called: http://www.pauseandpray.com It is always a blessing to me to read her blogs. She has such a beautiful way with words, that I can almost see what she sees and feel what she feels. It is a time that brings me ever closer to God. Though this is rather lengthy, it is on the topic of suffering. I hope you find some comfort in this one.
The Vatican Connection
Greetings from Rome with Sister Janet Fearns, FMDM
Sister Janet’s new site! Pause for Prayer
On a personal note… Suffering
In the life of every family, there are moments when there is nothing left but prayer and the love of each family member for each other. There are those awful moments when each individual knows that everything humanly possible has been done and there is nothing more in that awful, sickening helplessness, than to hand everything over to God. In one sense there is a freedom in that. I know in my mind that God is all-powerful and that his love for me and for those I love is immeasurably greater than anything I can possibly imagine, but, as the saying goes, “The longest distance in the world is the journey between the head and the heartâ€. I might know with my head that God can do all things, but it can sometimes be very hard to make my heart know and understand that same thing. It’s so easy, to quote another saying, “to be in partnership with God but to try to be the senior partnerâ€. It’s so easy to think that I know what I would do if I were God, and yet that’s not necessarily the right thing.
Here at Vatican Radio, I regularly receive prayer requests for critically ill children, children for whom their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents…everybody…must, at some stage have asked God to take on the child’s suffering rather than let that dearly-loved child have even one more second of pain. Yet there are moments when, however much I might beg God to let me take on that child’s sickness, God’s answer is “No†and the torment goes on. We ask why, and there seems to be no present answer, at least, not one that is easy to understand. It’s all too easy to say that God must have a reason, but, deep down, to be angry with God for not taking on my suggestion and making me suffer instead of the child.
Sometimes a sick child has wisdom far beyond its years and I think it cruel that circumstances have forced this sudden growing up on someone who should be young, innocent and carefree. Often a sick child is left trying to comfort its family, whilst, at the same time, the family tries to be strong and strives not to show the depths of their own helplessness and pain. Sometimes that agony is made all the harder because, occasionally, there could be a cure with more money or more resources, but the child is in the wrong place at the wrong time. There used to be a time, when I was a child, when the news would have regular stories about desperate parents who had somehow managed to scrape together enough money, thanks to friends and well-wishers, to travel halfway across the world in search of the latest reported treatment for leukemia. Today, leukemia can often be treated and the child’s life saved, but it’s not so many years since the word was a death sentence. It would be so easy for parents of such children to ask why their child was born then and not now. Why did it have to happen at all? I used to know a doctor who became an atheist because he thought that, if there is a God, he’s a sadist. If there is so much suffering, then, he thought, perhaps there isn’t a God and this world is all that there is.
There are no easy answers. It’s easy to look at the Cross and see a mother who stood beside her Son, dying in agony and shame. Was the Father so unloving, that even his Son wasn’t spared?
The reality is that, wherever there is pain and suffering, that is where the Crucifixion is happening. Wherever a family is in torment because of one of its number is ill, that is where Mary is standing at the foot of her Son’s Cross. Wherever there is anxiety, anguish, despair in a family, it is the Crucifixion and time and eternity merge. At that moment, Jesus on the Cross is not something that happened 2000 years ago. It is the here and now. It is in the present that Jesus is nailed to the Cross alongside my cross. It is in the here and now that Mary stands beside, not only her Son’s Calvary, but mine, too. It is in my own helplessness that Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?†It is in my own utter helplessness that Jesus cries, in the middle of his agony, “Into your hands I commend my spiritâ€. He hands everything over to his Father. He still dies, but he experiences the joy of the resurrection. Mary still held the body of Jesus, but she also knew the joy of Easter.
I use my bus journey to work as a quiet period of prayer and reflection, so I use an mp3 player to listen to appropriate music. This morning I looked back 40 years or more, to a time when my own sister was very ill and I asked God to take my life instead of hers. He didn’t and both of us are alive and well today. I wondered why, when I made the offer with all my heart, God didn’t accept it. It wasn’t a coincidence, I thought, that I suddenly heard the words of the hymn to which I was listening but not paying much attention. “You are my child and I love youâ€.
God doesn’t take one life in exchange for another. God loves each and every one of us as an individual. (That, incidentally, is why the Church is against the idea of ‘designer babies’). I can’t love anybody more than God does. I can’t want to hold and comfort someone any more than Mary wants to hold her own child in her arms, giving that child her love, protection and security. I can’t understand why I am at the foot of the Cross, probably any more than Mary could. I have no answers as to why my family is on Calvary, but what I do know is that, in my pain, I am not alone. God and his Mother are there with me, with my family and with my child.
God bless, Sr. Janet
Peace be with you, Heather
Susan
QUOTE: So bear with me if I don’t post everyday, I am enjoying my family! UNQUOTE
As well you should. Have a blessed time. I know you will.
Blessings,
~Toni~
I’m so glad you have family visiting you. I hope you have a wonderful time!
How wonderful that your family is visiting! I hope you have a great time being with them. So glad to hear you are halfway through radiation treatments! Praise God! Still praying for you to be completely cured. God is good - enjoy the Fourth!
Kate
Glad to hear that you’ve still got such a great perspective! He’s using you in a BIG way! Still praying! D
Hug those necks, Girl! We can wait to get updates. ;)
Hope you are having a good time! God bless your week!
That’s wonderful, Heather!! I hope you all have a wonderful time.
Hello Especially Heather..
Hope you are sharing a whole lot of quality time with your family.
Hope you get some pictures to show all of us!!
God’s continued blessings on you…Love Terry
Is everything OK? I’ve been stopping by for updates and haven’t seen any.