prayers for the angels

I don't like to talk about my job on my blog because I like to keep things separate. I know too many people who have gotten in trouble for getting mad at their boss and using their easily searchable, highly public blog as a place to go all crazy and start calling people "poo poo heads." Or you know, something slightly more offensive than that. But I want all my readers who might not know me in real life to know I have an awesome job helping families who have very sick children. It rocks my world. I just happen to not mention that on here a lot.

Tonight I was at an event at a local hospital and a family was being honored who lost their daughter tragically 3 weeks ago. Their daughter, who was was one and a half, was playing in the front yard with her brother who is four. Her father was hooking up a trailer to his SUV. The dad hopped in his car to back it up to the trailer and did not realize his daughter had walked directly behind his car. He hit her with the SUV and she died the next day due to her head injury.

The parents were dedicating a room in the hospital to their daughter and they stood up and talked about how much she had meant to their family. And how they knew she was in heaven smiling down on them and would hear the prayers of all the families in this new room in the children's hospital.

And I wept. And I thought about Lila and how fragile life really is. I work around horrible illness and trauma everyday and sometimes I become immune to what these families are going through. But tonight, I could see myself in that mother's eyes. How in one second her whole life changed. Hold your little ones close tonight. Whisper prayers for the angels all around them protecting them from the unseen. And say a prayer for one family who is having to face what no parents should ever have to face.

A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam

And for a brief moment its glory

And beauty belong to our world

But then it flies again

And though we wish it could have stayed...

~Unknown