Out With the Old - Renewed Every Day

Can you believe 2012 is here?!  I guess I am getting old because the years are passing so quickly. Looking back, 2011 has been an eventful year.  I visited Haiti twice.  The last time I was there I told the children I would have to return to see them because they had such a big piece of my heart.  I think particularly of a beautiful teenager named Sophlyn.  Her soft, shy smile is contagious!  She wrote in my journal that she had never known she was pretty or that anyone loved her.  Unimaginable?  Not really.
     My first visit in January to Haiti showed me horrific destruction and the way people had been forced to survive. Then came the April tornado here at home.  My own town was destroyed, the economy deeply impacted.  People were homeless overnight and lives were lost.  The next morning my husband was at work, of course since he works for the power company, and I faced a challenge.  I didn't yet know where the tornado had hit, or that there actually had been one, but I knew we had heavy winds the night before.  I had to check the fence - were there trees down?  Are the cows still inside that fence?  Oh, I hoped they were!! 
     So, I donned my rain boots, jeans, and grabbed my cell phone.  I walked around the fence, taking pictures and sending them to my hubby so he could assess the situation.  Thankfully there was only the top of a tree across one small piece of fence.  A friend came to clean it up and temporarily make some repairs.  I was SO grateful.  At the time I didn't know that the tornado had wiped out the houses on the other side of the ridge from me.  As the day went on and phone calls came, I realized exactly how much I had to be thankful for.
     The morning I returned from my second trip to Haiti, my daughter left to spend two weeks in Togo, West Africa.  On my way home, a friend called to say she had found us a house for my mother-in-law.  We had been looking for a long time.  We even thought we had found the perfect house once.  Somehow, though, the deal on that perfect house never seemed to work out.  God had another plan.  Today she is settled into what really is the perfect house.  It's close, we can see it from our own home, and she has really good neighbors.
     My mom made it through the first year without my dad.  When he was alive, I didn't really talk to them much, just checked in now and again.  Now I talk to her every day.  (Pardon me while I take a break - it's that time of night.)