Saturday, April 16, 2011

Amazing Grace

First of all, I am sorry it has been so long since I've blogged.  Life was pretty crazy here for a while as I'm sure you can relate.

As you know my life was pretty much consumed by my job from February 25th (my old boss's last day) until this week.  Our new CFO started on April 4th and has jumped in with both feet.  I am very happy to report that I had zero overtime this week and I am so excited about that!  There was always a part of me that wondered what it would be like to have a bigger career and executive status.  Well, that was a great way to "try it on for size" and I learned a very valuable lesson.  I don't want to be a CFO and I never want my career to come before my family on that level.  I am very happy being a financial accountant and I wouldn't mind being controller, but that's all the higher I want to go on the corporate ladder.  We have a really great team going at work right now and I'm enjoying it.

Enough about work and on to amazing grace.  In the middle of my work issue, my last grandparent passed away on March 20th.  Grandma Krause was 97 amazing years old.  She still lived on her own and was in great health except for extreme macular degeneration in her eyes.  She had a weak heart valve and was a two time breast cancer survivor.  Like I said, amazing.  She was in the hospital that weekend for a pulled muscle in her back.  That's what they were calling it because all her health tests came back great.  She was going to go to a nursing home temporarily for rehab before going back to her apartment.  The nurses found her Sunday morning not breathing.  Her heart just quit.  We'll never know if it really was a heart attack, or if the cancer had come back somewhere, but at 97 years old does it really matter?  She lived a complete, full life and taught her family a lot. 
Great-Grandma Krause, Jenna and Tori


Great-Grandma Krause, Jenna, Uriah & Tori
Thanksgiving 2010
So we had an unscheduled trip to Wisconsin for the first week of spring this year.  It was a whirlwind week.  We helped my sister and husband clean out Grandma's apartment, planned the funeral (although Grandma had most of it planned already) and otherwise just looked at each other wondering what we were going to do without Grandma.  It was really nice spending time with all our family, but it was a hard week.  Grandma's minister had a wonderful funeral service and we enjoyed putting together a picture board of Grandma's life (even though we joked the whole time about how she would hate us doing that as she avoided getting her picture taken at all costs and we even thought she might have had something to do with the foot of snow that fell the day before her funeral).  During the funeral service we sang the hymn "Amazing Grace".  That's when I really broke down.  I sat there crying as everyone else was singing "I once was lost, but now am found.  Was blind, but now I see".  I can't even explain how much I'm going to miss her. 

Flash forward to a week later at our ecumenical lenton service held at the methodist church in town.  We've been doing a bible study during lent about the blessing of the cross.  That week we talked about the blessings of blindness.  At the close of the service we sang "Amazing Grace", stood in a circle and lit candles.  It really struck me that I was singing "Amazing Grace" twice in one week under two very different circumstances.  Isn't God's grace truly amazing?

May you have a blessed Easter season!