I’m standing in Mom’s kitchen. There’s a stockpot of soup bubbling on the stove, and her counters are lined with steaming loaves of sweet bread. A couple of my boys are visiting with Dad in the living room. From where I stand, arms stretched like wings while Mom tucks straight pins into the sides of my dress, I can hear their voices–a sweet mixture of youth and maturity. Deep voices and little-boy giggles and everything in between.
Suddenly I feel like I’m in high school. Mom working pins with a green tape measure around her neck. A pin cushion on the table–a tomato or apple or something round and red that’s traveled the years. Mom could be pinning my dress for homecoming or a dance or a date.
But I’m grown with a couple of kids past high school years. I’m attending a wedding–a friend’s child, because my husband Lonny and I are at that place in life. And Mom’s hands are curled. Something about watching her, hands moving slowly and curved like my grandmother’s were, makes me ache. I begin to worry. I fear for the future and how fast time goes and how things change, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I swallow hard to swallow emotion.
Worry for the future steals the joy and peace of today.
I know this full well. I’m standing, both feet in rich blessing, and I become fearful. But the Lord knows my heart. He knows the tender places and the deep places and where I need the grace of His love to shine. He meets me here, time and time again, and whispers with the comfort of a Father.
I will never leave you.
This truth is soul-settling for me. It brings peace that overtakes the panic. I want to live in this moment, unafraid of the future. Because when I sit with my mug of coffee and Mom chats as steady as the hum of her machine and I look out the window into the yard of the home that held my childhood, I know that something holy is happening.
His Presence makes the ordinary extraordinary.
I won’t worry. I won’t fear. I’ll choose to breathe deep and reach into this day toward all the blessing and goodness it holds. I won’t chase tomorrow and lose what I have today.
Mom pulls the dress from her machine and snips the threads. She hands it to me, rich fabric of autumn red, and she smiles.
“Do you want to run to the bedroom and try this? Before we have lunch, we’ll see if it fits.”
When I stand and look in the mirror, I find that it does.
Beautifully.
Just the way His extraordinary grace fits, with perfection, into my anything-but-ordinary day.
