Good-Bye April!

Now that we have reached the last day of April and are looking toward May, I just can't believe how the year just seems to be racing by. There are lots of good things about May. We have lots of birthdays in May. Mine is Friday and I think I will ignore it this year.

This was the defining moment of my life. It was my eleventh birthday. See my Mom in the background.
She is so sick with cancer. By the time my next birthday would come around, she would be gone and I would have a new step-mother and three step brothers. Life is so full of twisting and turns. Had not all of that happened I would not be who I am. I can say, I am thankful for it all. Though, I admit to this, it is what I remember every year, this birthday.

Ron was reading one of his Bonsai books and he found this from a book called " Shohin Bonsai, Unlocking the Secrets of Small Trees."
The concept is called Wabi-Sabi.
" Wabi-Sabi is a key concept in the art of bonsai. Wabi-Sabi understands beauty to be imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Nothing perfect, nothing lasts forever, nothing is really complete.
Nature is perfect in its imperfection imperfection is valuable in bonsai. You could call Wabi-sabi and intuitive appreciation of the transient beauty of the physical world. there is a bittersweet quality that exists in a modest, rustic, imperfect or even decayed item that communicates the impermanence of all things."

 

As I thought about life and where it has led me. I thought about the beauty in the imperfections. Life sometimes leads us in places we would not go. Sometimes things happen that we would rather not go
through, but in the going through them we find we are in a place better than we ever dreamed.
"If God is almighty, there can be no evil so great as to be beyond His power to transform. That transforming power brings light out of darkness, joy out of sorrow, gain out of loss, life out of death."

So as I thought about the art of Bonsai, and how the work that goes into each tree to make beauty, I thought, yes, life is like that too. We are carefully tended and molded and loved. Like Bonsai, we have to be shaped, cut and wired. I watch as Ron takes those little limbs and wires them so that that tree will have a curve, or take a branch that would keep you from seeing the shape of the tree. So it is with us. For me, I see how God has caused in my own life the beauty of the imperfections, to make me  and to keep me dependent on Him for my life. I always see my weaknesses, my flaws and my failings. When Ron read the Wabi-Sabi to me it was like a light came on, because it is the beauty in the imperfections that draw us to the beauty that is all around us.

Thank you for stopping by to read my ramblings. Thank you so much for that. As I look through my life today, I am thankful for the gifts that overflow into my life. As always the good far outweighs the hard.
I wish you blessings upon blessings today.
 ~Kim~

 "Their souls shall be like a well-watered garden, and they shall sorrow no more at all."
Jeremiah 31:12