My Christmas Tree and TMI

We were supposed to be flying to Malaysia the day after Christmas to begin a two year period of mission work there. As of Nov. 4, when a bomb dropped on my 37 year marriage and shattered it into pieces, we not going to Malaysia. There is no longer a 'we' in that sense. I am still pulling out the shrapnel.

 I am currently living in my American home with my disabled daughter. It's a huge house, four bathrooms, 8 bedrooms plus a small study or office, two stories, a massive great-room upstairs.... It used to be a lot more crowded, but then the godsons moved away and the other six kids moved out, most of them married, and I spent the last year purging stuff I rather liked in preparation for the move to Malaysia (which wasn't my choice of places to go, and which I learned recently was to be the place where I and my daughter would be abandoned while my spouse moved to Taiwan with another woman). So here we are.

 We mainly keep to the master bedroom and bathroom because it's cold and it saves on the electric bill to just keep two rooms cozy enough to endure without wearing enough blankets to make up two beds. She has very small capillaries and doesn't endure cold well at all.  And I prefer some deep safe space at this time in my life.

 Although for decades Christmas was a huge event to me, as you can imagine, this year I am not feeling it. My Christmas things used to take up nearly a dozen of the very largest storage totes. I purged them down to two or three totes before we went to the Philippines. I haven't decorated for Christmas in three Christmases because I did not have access to my things, and now that I do, it's just too much to do, too heavy a weight, too hard. I thought about getting a tree and decorating it, but that was too much to do by myself. It's hard enough to get up and walk thru each day.

And then I saw a picture somebody posted online and then a friend reminded me that I did not choose this and I was ambushed, but God has always known and He is never surprised, my story will be different, but does continue, and that gave birth to an idea, and this is the result:

This is my Christmas tree this year.

  Its name is talitha cumi.