What is your “storeroom” crammed full of? 502-01-5

I grew up in the shadow of a beautiful older sister and a very intelligent older brother. My sister Mary smoked from the time she was in her early teens and passed away 11 years ago mostly due to smoking. Mary and I had rocky times when younger but grew very close in our later years. The last two years that she was alive we spent summers in a family RV park. Mary would stop by in her golf cart and off we'd go touring the park and stopping off for an ice cream.

My storeroom contains the grief of losing her too early and years of anger at the tobacco companies. Her marriage was on the rocks and we talked about traveling together after she retired but it was not to be. I carried part of her ashes in my RV for years and then gave them to her son so in a sense we did travel together. My storeroom does contain a little bit of resentment that my sister couldn't/ wouldn’t quit smoking until it had nearly killed her. She finally quit smoking and lived another three years always struggling for breath.

Had Mary never started smoking or quit decades earlier how many more years might we have been able to spend together. I have lots of guilt in my storeroom about my sister’s salvation or lack thereof. I had drifted away from the church so I was not sharing the message the gospel with her before her death. We were both raised in the church and sang in the choir. However it was not a church to talk about sin and being covered by the blood of Christ. Will she be in heaven or will there be tears in heaven for me because I failed my sister? Only God knows her heart and I just pray that she'll be there waiting for me.

And then there is my older brother Frank. In high school he was an all-around star athlete as well as a very capable student. My sister was a cheerleader while he was the jock and I was the pesky little sister. Frank went on to become an electrical engineer and in his later years earned a Masters’ degree. I joke that he got his Masters’ degree because I already had mine. Frank is still very much alive and knows that I'm a witnessing born-again Christian. His wife is very much into the Catholic Church after decades of being away from it. I don’t think my brother will ever join the Catholic Church and my sister-in-law will never join a Bible based church. Perhaps someday….

I watched the Strategic Trends 2012 in the KI Trust website this week-end. When I tried to tell my brother about it I became tongue-tied, more stuff in my storeroom left over from childhood.