We are the lucky ones.

In my family camping out means renting a cabin at a park, bringing a kitchen full of food, including filters and coffee for a plug-in coffee pot, and "roughing it" in an environment a tad less comfy than a Howard Johnson.

On one such adventure I was pregnant.  It was hot. And there were around 15 of us crammed in a cabin meant to sleep 8.  It was definitely rough.

It was August and August in Oklahoma, especially August in Oklahoma next to a creek, is MUGGY.

I was due in 3 months, constantly slick with sweat and just plain miserable.

And that meant everyone around me was miserable too.

Did I mention it was hot?

We were staying there one night.  Thank God it was only one night, I don't think I could have handled a second one.

On that one night my most wonderful husband sat around a campfire with my 2 nephews, my 1 niece, and our own 2 boys.  They were all under 5.  This may qualify him for sainthood, sitting around a hot campfire on an excruciatingly hot night with 4 little hot boys and one darling girl.

They looked into the fire and began to discuss hell.  A natural turn for any conversation taking place in such heat with a fire nearby.

But Josh led the conversation, turning it from the fires of hell to the wonders of heaven.

They all, well those of them that could talk, began to paint their imaginations of heaven.  Brian said he thought it was yellow, full of sunshine all the time.  Jonathan, a lover of all things food, said he thought it was full of candy, that the walls were made of candy and you could just eat them!

Noah, as he was 2, had very little to add, he was just looking for the fun company.  Ben, who was 1, was there, I'm sure, because I had kicked him from the air-conditioned cabin, into the arms of his daddy.

I sure am glad that Josh stayed with me during those years!

It was a fun trip, despite the strange man who sat with his feet in the icy creek water for so long that they became immobile and the paramedics had to be called.  Apparently his daughter had died one year previous, and he had come to the campsite to drink his sorrows away.

The next day, after a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and many attempts at fishing with the boys, we began to pack up.

Jonathan, who was 4, began to bounce on the back of my sisters car.

"Stop that!" I yelled.

 He then wandered over to me, asking if he could eat the banana I had just peeled open for myself.

"No."  I snapped.

But I gave him a piece of it anyway.

Finally we were packed up and on our way.  Josh and I sped home, eager to get back to our home and to clean up.  The rest of my family went canoeing.

Later that evening we went swimming at my sisters house.  She had dropped the boys off with their father earlier in the day and we were enjoying the quiet evening at the pool.  I was just hoping to float my full body in a cooler body of water.

Then she got a call.

Well, not the call exactly, more like the messages left from earlier calls.  The boys grandmother was frantic, apologizing profusely to Alisha, desperate.

Our lives changed forever that day.

There had been an accident.  The boys were swimming and the pool had collapsed next to an electrical line.

Jonathan had been killed.

He was now experiencing the candy walls that he had been dreaming of not 24 hours before.

And the last thing I had said to him was not kind.  Maybe my sharing of that banana was a sort of peace offering to him, a last goodbye of generosity.

I began to realize how precious life is.  How uncertain.  How petty our complaints about it.

And now I think that we are the lucky ones, those of us who have loved and lost before the time.  We recognize the wonderful gift that is the everyday.

I was 8 when my 7 year old best friend died.  Her fight against leukemia came to a glorious end.

She was my sister.

I was 26 when I lost my aunt, her long battle with cancer finally put to rest.

I was 27 when my nephew was tragically killed.  His short life cut short.

I was 32 when my grandmother surrendered in her fight against cancer.  She transitioned early one morning, her face reflecting the peace she had.

They went on.  We stay behind.  And with us stays the assurance that death is not the final goodbye, but rather the most wonderful beginning.  That soon, and very soon, we will see them again.  And they will be overjoyed at our arrival.  And it will be the beginning again.

Do you have that faith?  That when all seems lost, it isn't?  Jesus has given it to us, we just have to believe.

1 Corinthians 15:55

New International Version (NIV)

⁵⁵ “Where, O death, is your victory?
    Where, O death, is your sting?”^[a]