The Road to Recovery

The year's end has come like a soft, beautiful sunset.  After Christmas, the whole family traveled to Atlanta to see my parents and sister, who were living together under the same roof again for the first time in forty years. My parents have moved into a new apartment in my sister's house.  First they endured, then they survived, then they thrived.  It's good to see them smile again.
Joy and I stayed in Atlanta for three days, and celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.  I used to think that when we hit this far-off milestone of marital fidelity that we would be bored and tired, without fire or fun. The opposite it the case.  Marriage gets more fun and more passionate, the older you get. Whee!
We came home to some serious concerns.  Jill, daugher of my friends Jerry and Helen, was found passed out in her home, in an unconscious state. they flew her to Charlotte, where she is recovering from a possible seizure. It was a trying tearful time for the whole family, but it she is now on the road to recovery.
Right now, my church is full of individual problems. We have had deaths, sickness, blindness,  home invasions, and all sorts of problems n the families of our church.  It can be overwhelming. It is overwhelming.
But they are all on the road to recovery, now.  They are getting better. Just as Joy and I are getting better. Our problems are not over, but we see some light, thank God,  a kind of soft,  warm line of sunrise on our spiritual horizons. 
One image that sticks in my mind in thinking about some of the trials in our lives, and the lives of or friends.  The image of a net.  we are all interconnected. We cannot survive alone, none of us  We all need the comfort, support, and prayers of each other, and we need some strong faith connectios with God. We have experienced the strong support of families and friends over the past several years.  We have also seen so man poeple come through their difficulties unscathed, because of that same support.  We cannot be on the road to recover, or the road to happiness for that matter without a community of love around us.  We have that, thank God, and it is good.