Heed

When school was closed for MLK Day, we'd just been away without the kids for five days.  A nice winter's day inside was all we had planned.  Then a knock at the door.  More than a year had passed since a visit from LT, our old neighbor.  He wanted a ride into the next town and thought he'd try us.  He didn't need to get there fast, so he stayed for a while.  Over the next couple of hours, we ate together, drank tea and coffee, prayed, talked theology and played with the kids. 

I felt Grace move so freely that morning.  (Oh, when we let it do so!)  The kids were in and out of conversation and back and forth in play.  Cooking, clean-up and dishes just flowed along with the chatter and jokes and childhood stories.  Nothing out of place.  More than once in recent days had the bunch of us remarked how we'd missed LT.  He fit back in like we'd seen him just yesterday, like he's one of the family. 

I was bent down, getting some paper for A when she whispered to me in deep satisfaction, "I knew he was coming.  I thought he was coming, and he came."  I understood completely.  It happens to me and has for as long as I remember.  With joy, I whispered back something about connection, about the Spirit knowing her heart and speaking to her inside.  She smiled wide.

Not much later, LT was talking when I re-entered the kitchen.  He was saying that he'd started out that morning prepared to scrounge up change along the train tracks and out of shopping carts as he's always done.  "Something told me to stop," he noted his uncertainty.  He confessed he kept on course, ignoring it, but it kept on until pointing him to us.  He didn't want to come, not to ask for help.  But he couldn't shake it.  "I don't know what it was..." he wondered but spoke with jittery gladness for heeding.

You bet I let him know about A's encounter!  Plus I shared a thought on the Voice inside him, too.  I've no doubt both of them sensed that pull at precisely the same time that morning.  What untold prayers were answered that day, I can and do imagine.

Something new

The house quiets because the children are in bed.  I consider going myself, as I get dreamy watching the shadows of snowflakes bounce and fly on the wall.  One seemed to come descend inside, and then they all fall faster and fatter, and distorted through window glass they look more like a fifty Nerf gun attack. 

Every year when we get our first real snow, to me it's like the first time all over again.  Something new.  Something saved, too, because it's all enveloped in white.  That's especially the feeling when it comes on days like today, as I recover from the previous evening's too many loads of laundry and floors to wash in too many rooms after the littlest one puked everywhere.

It's like the new door on the house on our block.  Currently, empty apartments and boarded up homes number more than those that are not.  One house has been under major renovations on the inside but you cannot tell from first glance.  You couldn't until today.  I cannot believe the difference a door can make.  It isn't my taste, but it also isn't quite the piece of junk landlords will slap on only when it's absolutely imperative for their own sake that a door be replaced.  Is something new really happening?

Though I'm always dreaming about what's to come, no matter the time of year, I'm also no stranger to despair.  I need pictures like the snow cover to mirror my heavy prayers and then quiet me with hope.  I know the snow will melt away, and not before it's soppy and sullied!  Winter only lasts so long, and even spring has rain.  Still, I ache for a sweeping in to cover, cover.  Recover.  Whiten, lighten, hush. 

And make new.