Bye for now Norway!

I´m leaving Norway in less than a week and am not coming home until the snow hopefully has melted and it is starting to get just a little brighter outside each night. I´m going to live in Hawaii for some months, leaving my life behind here and facing something new; familiar, but yet strange. I´m leaving with mixed feelings; with sadness in my heart about leaving Mom and everyone and everything I love here, but also with rising excitement  of what this visit could mean of new life, hope, challenges and inspiration.

It´s no secret, even in my blog, that losing my Dad has left me feeling almost half, or like somebody else than myself or not fully alive. It is like the sun and moon and the stars are no longer in their same places and there is no order in the universe any more. I feel like a stranger in my own country, in my own town, in my own apartment. A stranger and a homeless, like I explained earlier. Maybe it´s time to break new land, to leave the old and look for something different? I´m not gonna be the same that I was, that Renate is gone. But maybe I can find what is left of me, and also sides that I forgot about or even some brand new ones?

Maybe I will see more of God in this place? Maybe I will find him. It´s also no secret that I´ve been looking for him the last few years of my life, and wondering why he sometimes seems so hard to find or understand or reach. Lately it has started to change, though. He doesn´t feel totally abscent anymore. It´s like we´re at least in the same room now, but maybe sitting at opposite ends of the table. Every once in a while he walks by and I can feel him for a minute, or he says something to me passing by.

                                  

Dad left me with three little words. One line that I heard him say at different times in my life, and in his. No other words has stuck by me like these since he left in January. I can still see him, sitting in the comfortable armchair (lenestol) by the fire... first it was a green and yellowish one (totally 70´s!), then he spent the evenings sitting in a dark pink armchair (totally 80´s!) and for the last months before his death, a brown specialized one that we borrowed from the health service to fit his needs. I wonder how many hours and days he sat right there by the fireplace, in those different armchairs, drinking coffee, praying for people and reading all kinds of books. But the words through the years were the same: "Focus on Jesus!"

Just picturing this and thinking about it makes me wanna cry. No matter what circumstances either of us were in, he pointed me to someone so much bigger than myself, that could hold the both of us. So that´s what I´m trying to do right now, in this special time uprooting from Norway for a while and settling down for a bit somewhere else - focusing on someone greater than me!