DIAMONDS ARE A GIRLS BEST FRIEND

 

As the late great Marilyn Monroe once sang:

"A kiss on the hand might be quite continental,

but diamonds are a girls best friend.

A kiss may be grand, but it won't pay the rental on your humble flat,

Or help you at the automat.

Men grow cold as girls grow old,

and we all lose our charms in the end.

But square cut or pear shaped, these rocks don't lose their shape,

diamonds are a girls best friend!

I am a huge Grace Kelly fan and I think my fascination with diamonds started while watching To Catch A Thief. Her in her beautiful white dress with a glistening diamond necklace adorning her neck. I'll never forget going to the jeweler for the first time with Greg to pick out my diamond engagement ring. It was a round cut with four little diamonds on each side in gold. I loved that ring until I accidentally threw it away one day. True story!! I still get so sad thinking about my gorgeous ring of love sitting in a nasty garbage dump somewhere in Phoenix. (sigh)

I was talking with my mom the other day and I was trying to explain to her some of my struggles with being a widow, as she is walking through it as well. She just finished her first year without my dad. That first year is such a hard journey. You stumble through and see the finish line of a year and think you've made some kind of accomplishment, only to wake up the next day and realize, you didn't win a prize and life still sucks. Now you have to do another year all over again. Being that I am coming up on my fifth year of being a widow, I used the analogy of a diamond to describe to her how being a widow feels to me now, where I am at today. 

So, I did some research on diamonds. The Romans thought they were splinters from falling stars while the Greeks thought them to be tears of the gods. There are no two diamonds that will ever be the same as each stone has a character of it's own. Diamonds are one of the hardest stones around and durable. You can wear them in every day usage and pass them down generationally. Diamonds are rare. It takes more than 250 tons of ore to be blasted, crushed and processed to yield just one carat of rough diamond and out of all the rough diamonds mined, only 20% are suitable for gem cutting. It takes years to make a diamond. Years of heat and pressure and endurance and then mining and more heating, filing and then cutting.

We have the five C's of diamonds: Carat, Cut, Color and Clarity. I was listening to a diamond expert talk about the five C's and how so many people put too much emphasis on clarity, when most flaws in diamonds are hard to see even under a microscope. But under a jeweler's careful cutting, he can get the diamond to have so many facets that it takes on it's magical glitter in the sunlight. 

This was how I was describing my widow's journey to my mom. I am trying to see my widowhood as just ONE facet of my life. Instead of seeing it as an all consuming giant boulder (that I like to sometimes think is my entire life), I need to look at widowhood from a little different perspective and see it's just one thing that makes me who I am. The widow facet doesn't shine when it's all I see, but when I move it around and look at it from a different perspective, like you would with a diamond, my widow facet shines and bounces off the other facets that make up the whole of me. I tend to wear my widowhood as the mantle of my life. This is who I am. Lori Rohlinger, the widow. But I forget that there is so many other things that make me who I am. I sometimes need to name those other parts. I am strong, I am funny, I am a learner, I make tow truck drivers get under my car with me and explain in words that I can understand what's wrong with my car.😂I am a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend. I am many facets, not just a widow.

And like a diamond, I have been heated and pressured and mined and crushed and cut and in my Master Jeweler's hand, who has expertly cut me to perfection, I am starting to see the other facets that surrounds the one I tend to focus on. Like Romans 5:3-4 reminds us, we can rejoice in our struggles because it's in the struggle that we are made strong, resilient, we find endurance and all of that together builds our character. We learn to trust God to do what only He can do because we are broken. He can take those broken pieces and create a one of a kind, multifaceted, unique person who has much to share and much to give. 

If you are struggling with that one thing that wants to label you, can I remind you that you are so much more than your struggle. Take it to God and pray that you can release it into His hands so He can show you all the facets and the glittery gorgeousness of your beautifully broken life!