Thankful

Death has a way of bringing life into focus. This morning I was thinking how I used to say, "I'm such a boring Christian. I never used to be a drug-addict living on the streets and Jesus saved me from a life of crime." Nothing dramatic. Jesus just quietly revealed himself to me through my sister, and I just found Him beautiful and believable. It was more the "I wanted what I saw she had" thing. I saw how her life changed dramatically one semester at college and it was just evident it was a supernatural thing.

Anyway, now I feel like maybe my story is a bit more dramatic. I guess not many people say they had to say goodbye to their 4 yr. old son due to a brain tumor, but they still believe in God. And not only that, but that they are more convinced of God's goodness and faithfulness because of it. Please don't misunderstand me; I do have feelings of abandonment by God, unfairness at what Joseph had to endure, etc., but this whole journey has proved God to me more than a hundred sermons could. Because if I could have walked away from God I definitely would have. But I couldn't and I can't. It is just not in my power. Losing Joseph made me realize that my security in God is not based on me; it's completely based on him--His faithfulness, His pursuing, His providing. The only thing I offered God for a long time is sadness, complaints, my own sin and pleas for mercy. But He hasn't let me go.

I read the book "A Severe Mercy" not too long ago. It is just a wonderful picture of a loving marriage, but at the end he has some great conversations with C.S. Lewis on grief and loss.

Lewis writes:

"It is remarkable (I have experienced it), that sense that the dead person is. And also, I have felt, is active: can sometimes do more for you now than before--as if God gave them, as a kind of birthday present on arrival, some great blessing to the beloved they have left behind."

I thought it was so neat to think of God passing on a blessing to those left behind. For me, the gift has not been a sense of Joseph's presence or being, but I do feel a deep contentment even amidst missing Joseph. I feel like his gift to me is the desire/ability to appreciate each day, no matter how mundane or draining it might be. I look back at days that I wished away and just don't ever want to repeat that mistake. They may have been exhausting days, but they were the days of Joseph's life.

My pace of life is a lot slower now. I will sit and smell June's hair and cuddle with her for a little longer, remembering how quickly these days go by. This is going to sound crazy, but I'm even a little sad that she will stop waking up in the middle of the night soon. I remember going in to Joseph when he would wake up at night while he was on steroids and it wasn't fun to be woken up, but I was so grateful he was alive and was not sure how many more nights we would have to cuddle and "hold handies" together. I used to get so annoyed when either of the kids would wake up at night, and while it isn't my favorite thing to do, I couldn't believe that at one point that was my biggest complaint. How blessed I was!

Even though I have experienced every parent's worst fear, I am grateful for the change in perspective I gained from it. I don't think I ever truly grasped how blessed I was to have children. I feel like God has given me a deep gratitude and contentment being a mom, something I didn't have when I first began this journey. That is the gift I feel Joseph left behind for me, and I'm thankful for it.

Rally Run Official Pictures

Here are some more great pictures taken by our official photographer who was given as a gift by our friend Lesli. I was so grateful because I love to take pictures but knew I would want to be soaking up the morning and talking to people, not worrying about taking the photos. Thank you, Lesli! And the wonderful photographer is Amber Beckham who captured the whole event fabulously.

Thank you again to everyone who came out and everyone who supported the first Joe P. Rally Run!

Joe P's Rally Run

The first annual Joe P's Rally Run was a huge success! We had terrible rain the night before and early that morning, but it cleared up just in time for the race. Thank you to the 150+ people who ventured out in the cold to support this event. Special thanks to Matt Peabody, Jon Holt, Clay Perry, and Joey Northern and the Rally Foundation for working so hard to organize this. And more special thanks to all the sponsors (E+ Cancer Care, Girtman & Associates, Moe's Southwest Grill, Big Move Games, Advanced Network Solutions, Pure Barre, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Journal Communications) who gave so generously and to all of you who donated. And thank you to Veggie Tales for the awesome umbrellas for all the kiddos. There were many people who worked so hard and gave of time and resources, so if I missed you, please know we appreciate your help and hard work.

We are overwhelmed at so much generosity. Together, we raised $22,300 for childhood cancer research. Praise God! All the money will go to the Rally Foundation which will put it towards pediatric brain cancer research specifically.

I am only posting a few pictures now but we had a great photographer there (thanks Lesli and Amber!!) so I will be posting her pictures soon.

Thank you again to all of you who came out and all of you who supported us. We are so grateful. See you next year!

Run, Baby, Run

Two weeks until the first annual Joe P. Rally Run!! I am so excited to visit Nashville and to participate in this race. The jury's still out on whether or not I will be able to run. I'm not hurt or anything, just out of shape! I will definitely be either walking or running or Allen will carry me. :) Or maybe someone can push both of us in our double jogger.

Dick's Sporting Goods has generously offered a $50 gift card to the person with the best costume. So, come decked out in your best costume and maybe you'll win! I have a great idea for one, so I'll have to see if I can get it ready in time (in all my free time with a newborn- ha ha).
Also, to ensure you get a t-shirt (and in the correct size) please register by Monday!! The t-shirts will be ordered on Monday so after that you may not get the exact size you would like.

Oh, and the website is www.joeprallyrun.com. You can sign up right there on the website.
Thank you to everyone who has signed up or donated! Happy Fall, and hope to see you all soon!!

Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Last year I totally missed it. I wanted to let you know about a couple of ways you can show support:

Chili's restaurants are donating 100% (yes, all of them!) of their profits to St. Jude's on September 28th. Kids can even decorate their own pepper to put on the wall to show their support.

You may also participate by running in/supporting Joe P's rally run, which will take place on Halloween in Nashville. Go here to sign up. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have donated or signed up. We are already at 30% of our goal of $25,000!! The Peabody clan will be there. I'm hoping to at least walk fast. :)

On the homefront, we are adjusting well to life with our new bundle of joy. June is such a sweet baby and Holly is being the sweetest and most caring big sister ever. She is so proud of "her baby." We have had lots of help from grandmas which has made the last couple of weeks so much easier. Thanks, Nana and Mimi, for your tireless helpfulness and love.

Hope to see you all at Chili's or in Nashville on Oct. 31st!

Welcome Maggie June!

On Monday morning (Labor Day!!) we welcomed Maggie June to our family. She arrived at 5:09 a.m. and weighed in at 10 lb. 4 oz. and was 21 in. long. Our very sweet friend and neighbor, Abby, got a call from us at 2:15 a.m. and she rushed over to stay with Holly so we could go to the hospital. It was hilarious because Abby had told me, "Please call me if you go into labor, even if it's at 2:37 a.m." When Allen and I got into the car the time was 2:37 a.m. She was close!


So we arrived at the hospital and June was born 2 hours later. It was obviously a very quick labor, but everything went very smoothly and she is a healthy, sweet, adorable little baby. Holly is completely over the moon about being a big sister and is doing great in her adjustment to having a new baby in the house. She is very protective, too. Today I told her we had to take June to the doctor so they could check her weight and give her a shot. She almost started crying and said, "Don't let them give her a shot! I'm mad at the doctor!"


Here are a few pictures of our girl. We thank God for this new blessing. She is such a sweet baby.

Happy Birthday, Joseph

We are so thankful that God gave us four years to nurture this precious boy, and that all of his days were written in His book before one of them came to be. We are sad we don't get to hold him and celebrate with him on his birthday but we know his day will be full of joy and gladness as he dances before the Father's throne.

Looking back over the last two years it is hard to imagine getting through them without the unbelievable support, love and prayers of our family and friends. We want to thank all of you who have loved us, prayed for us, and basically upheld us as we walked through an unbearably difficult time. It is hard to express the gratitude we have for all of you who have cared for us so deeply. Thank you.


In memory of Joseph's life I have put together a slideshow, along with some original songs by Allen. Over this last year a huge part of Allen's healing has been writing and recording these songs with his friend, John. I know I'm not biased but they are some of the most heartbreaking yet beautiful songs you will ever hear. These two are the only ones ready right now, but we hope to share more of them soon. And please forgive the length of this slideshow. It was just too hard to make it any shorter.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

John 14:1-3
Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.


Philippians 3:20-21
But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.


Revelation 21
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

A Letter to Joseph

Dear Joseph,

I received a birthday invitation to your little buddy's 5th birthday the other day. It was then that it hit me: we are a month away from your 5th birthday. And also about a month from the day we said goodbye to you. The time goes by but the heartache remains the same.

Sweet Joseph, I miss you every day. Every day I ache to see you, touch your sweet face, hear your loud, boisterous voice and laugh. No-one can ever replace the special, beautiful little boy you were to us. When you were little I used to marvel at the depth I would see in your eyes. It seemed they were older than your tender age. You seemed to understand, get things, before you should have. And you proved it with your advanced humor. You could make jokes that adults found funny. But you also proved it with your kind heart and eagerness to love and live life fully.

I loved your mischievous spirit. You always laughed the hardest and had the best gleam in your eye when you thought you or someone else was getting into mischief. You would flap your arms up and down and squeal with delight when you were younger. Then as you got older you would smile excitedly and shrug your shoulders and share the mischief with your partner in crime. You would say things like "Let's not tell Daddy we had another brownie!" or "Let's not tell Mommy I got to stay up late." It was always so fun to share a mischievous secret.

You, with your child-like passion and love for life, grew me up as a person and as a mother. You taught me to get over my selfishness, my need for order, my need for control. I realize now that the most important thing is to appreciate and love fully the ones you treasure. Having a house that's in order will not go in the photo albums. I used to get so stressed about how messy our house got, but now I wish for the mess...the cars and trains all over the place, evidence of a happy child playing.

Anyway, dear Joseph, how I wish we could have a party for you to enjoy. I would love to see you playing with your friends, tearing into presents, and gobbling up your cake. But I know you are celebrating in heaven and your joy and life are complete. We will treasure the days and years we had with you and I will be forever thankful for the lessons I learned from my sweet boy.

Joe P's Rally Run Website

Joseph's 5K now has a website! You can register to run or just donate to the cause right there on the website. We are hoping to raise $25,000 to fund more research for childhood cancer. I think we can do it! This is the website:

www.joeprallyrun.com

Thank you so much to Matt P. and Rally foundation for working so hard to get this up and running. It will be in Nashville on October 31st. It is not intentionally on Halloween--that is just the date that worked for Centennial Park.

I'm sorry I have been so long in updating! We have settled back into Atlanta and are enjoying our new home. I had a lot of fear/anxiety about coming back and being away from family and Allen starting back into a crazy schedule but so far God has made the transition relatively easy for us. We have a great community of friends here so Holly and I have been enjoying reconnecting with friends and their kids and she and I have been exploring our new area of town, finding the library and pools and such. We just joined our neighborhood pool (which we didn't even know about when we moved in!), so I can see that being a great source of entertainment for the rest of the summer. We also had a nice couple of weeks before Allen started back at work. For Father's Day he was lucky enough to get princess Yahtzee, a game he has been begging for for months :). Holly likes to play this game approximately 5.3 million times a day. Isn't this guy a trooper? He even participates in tea parties.

Allen had a couple of weeks of orientation but officially started back at Emory on Wednesday. He had completed 6 months of his intern year, so they gave him credit for that. This was the hospital where we took Joseph initially so there have been moments that have been very emotional for him. I cannot imagine even stepping foot inside that hospital without just breaking down, so I am so proud of him for entering back into this despite all the obstacles. It is not humanly possible to get through this, as I know he will be confronted with children that remind him of Joseph or have similar illnesses, but (as trite as this sounds) with Christ all things are possible. And somehow in our very weakest state, He is glorified most.

The baby is growing steadily and I'm wondering (again) if my belly could possibly grow any more. I know it can but when I look at it I just don't see how it's possible. I have about 2 more months until my due date, but who knows when this baby will make her appearance? Joseph was 10 days late and Holly was 5 days late, but I'm really hoping this one won't wait that long! She is moving around a ton, and often I will think something has hit my belly but it's just her kicking me, letting me know she liked her lunch. :) Here is an updated picture:


I am so thankful for this new little life inside me and hope it will help in this continual healing process. Having Holly to care for and snuggle with and entertain has been vital for me this last year. I just cannot imagine losing a child and then just having an empty house--no-one to wake me up in the morning or need playdates or activities, etc. . I don't even want to imagine what state I would be in if that were the case.

I had a doctor's appointment today and everything looked great. The doctor even let me have another ultrasound--just because. She was measuring great and she estimated the baby weighed about 3.5 pounds. It is amazing to me that she will most likely gain another 5 or so pounds in the next few weeks.

I hope you all are enjoying the summer and getting to enjoy pools and beaches and cookouts and all that fun summer stuff. Hope to see you October 31st!

Heaven

I've never experienced life to be perfect, nor have I expected it to be so. I am usually not surprised if things go wrong. I don't feel offended. It's just the order of the universe. I do believe God is good and is in control, but somehow this world has gone very wrong. The fact that there is genocide in Africa, a booming sex trade in Europe, and millions of orphans worldwide testifies to this fact. Clearly, I am not the only person who has to deal with the effects of sin and death. So I usually feel like I can deal with my small share of difficulties.

However, losing Joseph has changed me in so many ways I almost feel like I've emerged from this a new person. I really and truly don't expect that everyone I'm close to will be alive tomorrow. Death has come so close to home that it seems like a very real possibility that anyone I love could be taken from me at any time. I look at newscasters or sportscasters and see their smiling faces and wonder, "Do you know how short life is? You are reporting on someone dying as if it couldn't happen to you or won't happen to us and yet your life could be taken from you this next minute." I just feel like world is carrying on in some kind of charade, pretending like we live forever and death is this horrible end that only comes to the very unfortunate or very old. But we all die. Every single one of us. No exceptions (unless God returns before we die, of course). Okay so that's the one exception. :)

But we don't live like we know we are going to die. We go about life, collecting toys and things and money, and chase after bigger houses, nicer cars, better jobs, as if all that will guarantee us some kind of permanence. How did we buy into this?

We were invited over to a couple's house the other night--the Scotts. They have lost two beautiful small children to a rare neurological disease that slowly robs its victims of the ability to talk, hear, move, function, yet it spares their brain in that they are aware of what is going on in their little bodies. They felt trapped in a once healthy body and their parents were powerless to stop their deterioration. What kind of hell on earth would that be?

Yet they invited us into their home, cooked us dinner, allowed us to see their children's rooms and pictures, and generally opened their hearts to us. I felt like we were walking on sacred ground. They had moved into this beautiful farm house with a barn to provide a better environment for their children and I felt so special they were willing to share it with us. But more than that, we instantly entered into a level of talking that I think is unusual for a first meeting. We talked about suffering, anger, pain, God, our counselors, our feelings, how we cope with our individual pain, etc. It was beautiful to enter into a real conversation about real things and not pretend like our lives were perfect. Sure, they are angry, confused, raging at God, raging at other people. But that doesn't scare me anymore. Before all this happened with Joseph, I would have been really sympathetic, but not very tolerant of people irate at God. I would have thought it irreverent. Now I see it as a natural honest response, and one that God can handle. And God has shown me the depths of feelings I can experience so when I see those in other people now it doesn't offend me or scare me like it used to. I really felt so blessed that they would share a window into their souls with us.

They are faced with the sobering fact that this world is not it. Their children are now in another place, and as much as we live in this world, our hearts are tied up in another. But the other side of feeling like death is close at hand is feeling like heaven is close at hand. I think so much about heaven now, talk about it almost every day with Holly, and probably view it as a much more real place than I used to. Holly will still say things like, "I like playing with Joe P. the best. But, he's in heaven." Or, "I do have a brother, but he's at heaven." We will often speculate about what he's doing, what he's playing with, if he's watching us and laughing, etc. The Bible says in Hebrews that we are surrounded by a "great cloud of witnesses" who are there cheering us on in the "race marked out for us." I believe that to be true, and I like to imagine Joseph very near, watching, laughing, encouraging, much more present than we can actually see.

I also feel like in worshiping now, the realness of God's presence is so overwhelming I can't help but cry. Every single time I go to church I have a really hard time not weeping openly. I don't completely understand why this is, but I think part of it is that I connect Joseph with Jesus now, so when I am singing to God I can picture Joseph there too, joining in the chorus, and the reality of that is so joyful but then sad that I am just overcome with emotion.

One day all things will be made right. One day things will be perfect. I am confident of that. But for now we live in the in-between, caught in a world of pain and sadness and gross imperfection, yet strangely connected to God and heaven and often catching glimpses of that beauty. It is a tough place to live in--yet the promise of perfection keeps me from losing all hope. One day I will see Joseph's smile again, sing with him, play with him and just enjoy being in God's presence. And there will be no sickness or sin or death. That hope doesn't make the pain of missing him go away, but it does keep me from drowning in it.