How am I doing? As a friend of mine once said of her aging parents, "Great for the state I'm in."

Seriously I hurt...I hurt a lot. But I have a great deal of confidence in God. Daily he is giving me everything I need to make it through. I am leaning on him with all that I have...simply because I am completely incapable of handling this one. Most of you know how I felt about Chuck...I absolutely adored the man. If he were a bit more removed from me, I could totally see myself trying to handle this on my own...as is my way. However, this one is too big; it hurts too much; I simply cannot do it. So I praise God for this...the fact that every morning I have to reach out to him just to get out of bed. He faithfully picks me up and carries me through the day.

Once again, God has provided me with some timely tips...right as I'm moving into the good and angry portion of this grieving thing. Okay, so the tip I learned tonight involves the denial of feelings and how it prevents healing. God cannot heal what I do not reveal...hate for example. We all hate. However, as soon as we catch ourselves hating something, we say to ourselves, "Oh, it's wrong to hate...I shouldn't do that...blah, blah, blah." We immediately try to shut down our feelings. Essentially we are denying the hate that really is there. Here's the deal...we do hate, and God KNOWS we hate. Right now I'm hating some people and some things. Rather than playing the "Jan, you really shouldn't hate people" game, I'm gonna try the honesty game. I will be keeping a personal journal so I can confess all the anger, hate, gunk...reveal it all to God so he can heal me.