Recovery Day.

Today was a day of recovery for me. Recovery of spending time with SO MANY PEOPLE at Disneyland the last couple of days. One of the joys of being an introvert is the need to recover and rejuvenate by having alone time after social events.

My fiance's parents gave me a book entitled "Sarah: The Women of Genesis", which I finished reading today. It is a novel based loosely on the experiences of Sarah and Hagar. I am also reading a devotional book on the women of the Bible. As it so happened, the stories of Sarah and Hagar from one book coincided with the reading of the other book.

Something that resonated with me served as a closing to the story, as Sarah, an old woman looked back over her life. The book connected Lot's wife (who turned into a pillar of salt because she turned and looked at Sodom & Gomorrah when she should have been looking towards her future) as being Sarah's sister, named Qira.

And thinking of sisters reminded her of Qira and her tragic blindness to anything that mattered. Qira was almost as blessed as I was, thought Sarah, but she never knew it, and kept trying to get joy from those who had none to give, and rejecting it from the only ones who knew how it could be obtained. And she died because she couldn't let go of the very things that the dead always leave behind, and couldn't hold to the only things that the dead can carry with them.

The love of a good man for a good woman. The love of good friends for each other. The love of parents for children, and children for parents. The love of brothers and sisters. The memory of joy and grief, which all becomes joy when enough time has passed. This is the treasure that I have won through all the years of my journey through this life, thought Sarah. And every bit of it I'll take with me beyond the grave. I'll meet God then, Abraham promises I will, and I will take all these treasures and lay them out before his feet, for God can see them easily even if mortal men cannot. And I'll kneel before the treasures and say, "O God, I thank thee for giving these to me during my life on Earth. No daughter has been better loved than I, nor any wife, nor any mother. I never deserved them. They were not mine by right. But I hope that, having been given such gifts so undeservingly, I used them well, and gave back to thee a life that was worthy."

And I thought to myself how well said that was.