Happy Birthday Shane!

This time last year we were hopefully and fearfully celebrating Shane's 38th Birthday.  This year we will be celebrating with hope, tremendous love, comfort, joy and deep deep sadness.  Today would be Shane's 39th birthday.  We are celebrating with hope because we have hope in Jesus Christ and we have a promise to be with Shane again in eternity.  We celebrate loving Shane more today than we did yesterday and less than we will tomorrow and knowing how much he deeply loved each one of us.  We celebrate with comfort because God continually comforts our family through memories, rainbows, people and stories and his legacy.  We celebrate with the joy of knowing that Shane is celebrating in a new way with his Father in Heaven and the joy that he brought to us here on earth.  And we celebrate with deep deep sadness for the fact that he is not here in body, that we can't eat out with him as our family tradition, that we can't have Hot Molten Lava Cake with him and that November 21st will never ever be the same without him.  We have sadness that we won't be waking up with him and planning a day of activities.  However, this day will not go unnoticed.  We will be celebrating his life today.  We will celebrate by praising Jesus at church (cause Shane would have it no other way), we will celebrate with lunch with family, then we will plant a dwarf lacey leaf maple in a strategic area in our yard so that when we pull into the drive our attention will be on the tree planted in memory of him, instead of our attention being on the red truck that is parked more than moved.  Then we will travel to an out of town church to hear one of Shane's favorite preachers and my favorite Christian singer.  All in memory and honor of Shane and the life he lived here.  I recently spoke to an assembly and I told the crowd that while I would love to be miserable and wallow in self-pity I choose to be joyful.  Not only for the fact that I will be with Shane again in a place without grief, pain, death or sorrow, but also because I know that Shane would want me to choose joy.  He would want me to celebrate his life here with gladness and not sorrow. Shane's mom was here the other day and we were talking about his upcoming birthday, the holidays and she shared with me again about the day he was born.  She had him on a Sunday, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and went home on that Monday and it was snowing. Some how I know God had that planned out, just like he had Shane's days planned here.
   So today while I reflect on his birthday's past I would like to also reflect on his new life.  Jake and I were talking about how old we think Shane is in heaven and Jake said he thinks 17, I prefer to think of him at about 30.  One of those things we will not know until we are there, but for now I choose to think of him as 30 and full of life as he was at that age here.  I prefer to replace that thought instead of the memories of last year and what we were dealing with.  I was reading my journal from that time and had written my thoughts and  how we celebrated last year..."Shane's spirits were great today, a new sense of hope, I wrote that he was so unselfish that, again, today he said that this is not about me but about Him. I journaled how I wanted to be just like him so unselfish.  Then I wrote a prayer...Lord, I ask you to let me spend Shane's next 38+ years with him.  He just has so much more to do here on earth before he goes home.[Thinking God thought he would finish what he was suppose to in the next 5 months] Amen." We celebrated with dinner picked up at Longhorn's, and a candle in a fried apple pie.  I have a picture of him blowing out the candle making a wish.  I could almost bet you that the wish he wished while blowing out that candle had absolutely nothing to do with him, because he was like that.
 His gift last year was a call from the doctors telling him he had a confirmed malignancy, but this year his gift is a place in the Kingdom of the Most High.   I know that is the gift that Shane so desired, knowing he would never exchange or take a refund if given the chance.

Happy Birthday Shannon! We miss you like crazy!!

We love you!!  Deede Bo, Jakey, Sammy Fly Shookem and Lil Curl