Today is a day of celebration. We celebrate the life of Justin. His legacy. His children. His moments here on earth and his new life in Heaven. We celebrate his achievements, his laughter, his love for others and his potty mouth. If Justin was a part of your life, he changed you. He showed you a way of living that made your head spin and your heart smile. He showed you what it looked like to OPENLY seek Christ, to HUMBLY learn to put God first...and to look good while doing it.
12 years ago today I talked someone into giving me floor seats so I could take Justin to his first NBA game. The next year on his birthday I took him on his first airplane ride. And the next year we drank margaritas with our best friends at our rehearsal dinner.
Yup, that means tomorrow is our wedding anniversary. We didn't have the perfect marriage. We didn't raise the perfect kids. We didn't have the biggest house or the fanciest cars. But, we sure did have a blast. We walked alongside each other through new jobs, new friends, finishing college, that time when we got our electricity shut off two months in a row and slept by the fireplace (one of my FAVE memories ever), new houses, more kids, big ideas, lots of traffic tickets, and sickness.
I never gave up on him and he most definitely never gave up on me.
He showed me a kind of love that I didn't know a thing about. And together we learned about the greatest love of all...the love of Jesus.
Today is hard and tomorrow will be harder, but these are just a few of the firsts that we are gonna need to get through over the next few months.
There isn't a widow playbook that can prepare you for these types of things. It is too personal for anyone to be able and map out for you. But, it is survivable.
Knowing that Justin is whole with Jesus puts a smile on my face. Knowing that his kids know very much how loved they are by their daddy puts a smile on my face. Knowing that he would tell me to shut down this sappy post and have a margarita for him makes my face AND my heart smile.
I wanted to write more about the bears, but God always messes up the plans of what I want to write about. Like every time. Anyways, in the fog of those first few days after he passed...I managed to gather some of his favorite dress shirts and pass them along to a friend. This dear friends mama turned those shirts into the very most precious gift of all. The boys got to choose their Daddy Bear last night and they will now have just one more sweet reminder of their daddy, this time in the shape of a teddy bear. We shed tears and snuggled some bears and laughed about how daddy may not be real happy about his shirts being cut up. JMac keeps us laughing...that is for sure.
