Focusing On the People In Front Of Me

This post is #72 in a year-long series ... Through this series of posts I plan to share our family's experiences during our 17-year-old daughter's year-long battle with brain cancer, which began in February of 2008. My desire is to process through the events of that year from the perspective that a decade of time has brought ... for myself, really. But if you'd like to follow along, you're welcome to join me.

Well, did you wonder what happened to me?  I'd been doing so well with making my daily posts, and then I became disconnected.  Literally. 

If you've followed this blog for a few years, you are familiar with the While We're Waiting ministry, which God birthed out of our experience with Hannah's cancer journey and subsequent homegoing.  I will share more specifics about the WWW ministry in future posts, but basically the cornerstone of the ministry is the retreats we host for bereaved parents.   Until very recently, all of these retreats were hosted and facilitated by the four co-founders of WWW, primarily in Hot Springs, Arkansas. 

This past weekend, we hosted our first While We're Waiting Weekend for Bereaved Parents in the Pacific Northwest.  We were based at the Ochoco Christian Conference Center, which was in a beautiful and very rural location in central Oregon.  So rural, in fact, that there was no cell phone service and no wifi.  For a person who spends the majority of her day sitting in front of a computer screen replying to emails, processing registrations, and monitoring our WWW facebook pages, this was quite a change!  Quite a refreshing change, I dare say.  It allowed me to slow down and focus on the people who were actually right in front of me.  I did have a couple of very brief intervals of wifi at the camp office, but certainly not enough to compose and publish a blog post.

Over the next few weeks, my posts will be intermittent.  My brother and sister-in-law and their two children, who are on a brief furlough from an overseas mission field, will be staying with us for several days next week.  Bethany, who is now all grown up and married, will be graduating from dental hygiene school in a couple of weeks, and she and her husband will be joining us on a nice vacation to celebrate her accomplishment.  I'll be posting a few decade-old emails over the next few weeks as I continue to process through the events of Hannah's year of cancer ... but for the most part, I plan to focus on the people in front of me.