The Arkenstone

Today I was making my bed and I realized an answer to my prayers.  I have asked God to do something for me that has alluded my own efforts.  That is to help me anticipate life with Wylie as I hold the possibility of her physical death.  I pulled up the covers and found excitement simmering in my heart.  Desire to nest, to remake home here with us surfaced as I replaced our pillows.  This is an answer.

I know that she is constantly choosing us--holding on and healing to be with us.  My heart longs for her to be all she is meant to be and for us to be all that she deserves.  When I go and sit with her at the hospital, I read The Hobbit aloud which is really a perfect story for now.  Tonight, Bilbo found the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain, in the heap of treasure Smaug, the dragon, had long made his bed.

...indeed there could not be two such gems, even in so marvelous a hoard, even in all the world.  Even as he climbed, the same white gleam had shone before him and drawn his feet towards it.  Slowly it grew to a little globe of pallid light.  Now as he came near, it was tinged with a flickering sparkle of many colors at the surface, reflected and splintered from the wavering light of his torch.  At last, he looked down upon it, and he caught his breath. The great jewel shone before his feet of its own inner light, and yet, cut and fashioned by the dwarves, who had dug it from the heart of the mountain long ago, it took all light that fell upon it and changed it into ten thousand sparks of white radiance shot with glints of the rainbow.

Wylie glows with a breathtaking light.  Just like the Arkenstone, she magnifies all the love shining from God and people into ten thousand sparks of white radiance.  Tonight, before I left, I put my lips to her soft head and kissed her beautiful crown.