You can cut umbilical cords, but you can't cut heart strings

As Ann Voskamp and her husband get ready for a long trip across Canada to enroll their eldest son in college, she realizes that a parent never stops being needed.

God as my witness, I will be your witness, and you can climb and you can take risks and you can go east and you can go west and distance never stopped love from being a witness.

Go ahead, sign me up to witness the launchings and the beginnings, witness the dares you take, the challenges you rise to, the heartbreak you don’t want anyone else to see and the crazy you wish you could hide. The Lord looked down, from heaven He viewed the earth in all it’s crazy and God sees it all – and He sees to it all – and He doesn’t turn away. God is your witness: You are seen and known.

Who will be God’s witness? So He is seen and known?

Be brave. In all your crazy, be brave, boys. And I’ll be there, in heart or in body, to witness the first dates and the failed dreams and it’s okay to cry, boys, your tears are safe with me.

Because the truth is: Life’s a trial and everyone needs a witness — someone on your front row, someone on your sidelines, someone to clap you across the finish line when everyone else has gone home.

Everyone needs a witness – someone to testify you were really here and you really tried, someone to witness your wounds and believe in your worth, someone to say even your crazy can’t stop you from being crazy loved. Everyone needs a witness who will stand and not hold you back because if we all only lived safe, no one would ever get saved.

You can cut umbilical cords but you can’t cut heart strings.

You can’t sever the sinews of a family, the way the grass under the swing and the loudness of living and the doors slamming and butter dripping corn on the cob on the porch all get into all of you and how we wind around each other so maybe we never leave each other, only carry each other?

Isn’t that what Dr. Seuss had said?

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

And every milestone moment always forks and you get to choose which road you’ll go — bitter or blessed.

And I witness each of them, nod at the lanky boy at the end of the table, at time and the passing of a season, at the thinness of everything drifting and how life just keeps meaning change.

The best way to prepare for what’s ahead is to be present to what is now.

Be present to the gift of now.