We spend about 8 months of the year in our little rolling home.  In our travels we have met all kinds of people and have seen all manors of RV’s.  Some people have been loud and crazy…others keep to themselves…but most never meet strangers…kind of like us. Usually we are the youngest in the parks…but we don’t mind…we have friends of all ages.

Four years ago, while we were in Fredericksburg at Lady Bird Park, we met Jean and George. One evening while Bryan was looking at a tree in the park George hollered out at him…. “Hey, leave my pecan tree alone”.  Bryan jumped because he didn’t know where that booming voice came from.  And that is how we met the friendly jokester and his sweet wife.  George is a retired Vice Cop, from Houston and Jean is a retired rural route Mail Woman.  Every year he and some of his former co-workers get together at Lady Bird Park to reminisce…and boy do they have some stories to tell.  Well one evening us two couples went out to have a beer and listen to live music at Silver Creek.  We were talking and getting to know each other and Jean started talking about their girls.  They had four beautiful daughters.  As she is naming them and telling their ages…she said almost forty years ago they lost their second daughter to cancer when she was just two years old.  She told us what that journey and heartache was like.  Then she told us about her last two girls, who lived in the same town, but it was a few hours from them.  Six years earlier one daughter committed suicide from being in a verbally abusive marriage, they tried numerous times to help her get out of that marriage, but her despair was to great to overcome.  The last daughter got the call from the hospital about her sister.  She called her parents and told them to come quickly… as she rushed to the hospital a short distance away….where she learned her sister didn’t make it.   While at the hospital, waiting on her parents to arrive, she suffered a sudden aneurysm and died.  So George and Jean arrived at the hospital to learn the horrific news that they had lost two daughters that day.  Tears started rolling down my face as I listened to Jean tell me about their daughters…their life story.  She reached across the table and squeezed my hands and said “You are such a sweet, tender-hearted young woman.”  I replied “I know your sorrow…I live it too…but not times three.”

That is… T H R E E …of their four….beautiful, young daughters…their babies…their precious children…gone.  So when I am feeling overwhelmed…or heavy sorrow….I think of Jean.  I think of her heartache…her pain…her suffering.  If Jean has the strength and grace to continue living her life…after losing three children…I can do no less.  There, but for the grace of God, go I.  Please say a little prayer for Jean and George.