I rubbed my sleeping daughter’s back, expecting to be greeted with a groggy grin. She stretched her arms and then began feeling around for her favorite teddy bear. When he was not quickly found, my six year old bolted upright and began a frantic search. I realized there would be no grins of any sort that morning if we did not find her bear.
After digging through tangled sheets and blankets, I found him. Cooper, the once soft white bear who is now matted and, well, not so white. He has a replacement nose and has had several “surgeries” to fix holes worn by love.
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I did not need my seven year old to tell me she was irritated with me. The exasperated sigh. The slumped shoulders. The begrudging shuffle into the bathroom. They were obvious indicators of her less than cheery attitude.
Undeterred, I set about our morning ritual. With a bottle of detangler, a hairbrush, and a blow-dryer, I worked to get Katie’s unruly hair to calm down and look presentable for school. But that particular morning, she wanted nothing to do with our routine.
“Why do we have to do this every day?,” she questioned with great dramatic flair and lots of sighing.
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Scars. Most of us have them. Physical ones. Emotional ones. Some minor. Some painfully deep. They serve as reminders of our past wounds and can hold the ability to stir up powerful emotions. Bitterness. Anger. Regret.
Take my simple scars. On each of my ears I bear the evidence of multiple piercings. Those tiny outer marks cannot even begin to hint at the massive inner scars I accumulated during that rebellious season of my life. I am not saying having my ears pierced over and over again was a sin. But they do serve as a reminder of a time when I had turned my back fully on God.
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“Wow! Look at that! Can you see that, Mommy?”
“Oooooh…look over there!”
I smiled as I listened to the joy-filled exclamations coming from the back of my minivan. You would think we were driving through some exotic locale or past a squeal-inducing theme-park. But we were just driving down a normal, everyday road in our hometown.
So what was all the fuss about?…
Two little girls with their first pairs of glasses could finally see! With the lifting and lowering of her bronze-colored frames, my oldest began a little chant, “Fuzzy…not fuzzy…fuzzy…not fuzzy…”.
As a fellow farsighted one, I totally get the wonder my girls have been feeling.
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“O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You…” Psalm 63:1 (NKJV)
I never expected the Lord to use the hound dogs next door to bless my life. They are just your everyday, ordinary hounds…the kind that get to howling in the middle of the night and that bark their heads off at anything that moves during the day. I had never paid them much attention, that is until one particularly cold, winter morning.
I held a delightfully warm cup of coffee in my hands and gazed out my kitchen window. As I sipped and pondered what I should do next with my day, I noticed the dogs.
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I remember the first Christmas without my father. I was only eighteen, my brother only fifteen. We were no longer small children busting at the seams with dreams of Santa and tiny reindeer, but we were still children. Ones with a newly widowed mother.
I do not remember any of the gifts I got that year. I do not remember lights or tinsel or Christmas carols. But I do remember how gaping and obvious my father’s absence felt. I remember a feeling of fumbling through the holidays, an unsteadiness that made all of life seem off kilter. I remember packing up and going to stay with friends because we could not face Christmas morning at home.
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I cannot remember the day my oldest daughter Megan stopped wanting me to carry her. What I do remember is being a bit stunned when I went to wake her up one morning…
I rubbed her back gently and readied myself to lift her from her bed, but she hopped up and stumbled sleepily into the living room by herself. A small declaration of independence, yet one that left this momma’s heart reeling.
So when my nine-year-old lifted her arms for me to carry her one morning last week, I quickly scooped her up with joy. Her long, lanky legs bumped gently against my own as we made our way down the hall.
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