The Resurrection

It is Easter morning, and the local paper has featured a beautiful spread on baby Sully and our friends Brad and Heidi Anderson. Here is a link to the article and a video.

Six Days of Sully

Oh, Father, thank you for your victory over the grave! Thank you that one day,

He will wipe away all tears from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
Revelation 21:4

They were right...

I remember being a kid, and having "old people" (read: friends of my parents, who were just about my age now) say things to me like, "My goodness, you're getting so big," or, "I can't believe how time flies. I remember when you were only this tall." (You know the drill, with the hand held out somewhere around their hip.)

At any rate, I've realized something. They were right. "Time does fly," and, "Life is short," and, "Kids do grow up too fast!"

Today is my son's birthday. It follows on the heels of his younger sister's just two weeks ago. His older sister's will be here two months from now. It is birthday season in our home.

And my kids are growing up fast. Today my son is twelve. It is the first birthday when he is taller than I am. It is the first birthday for a boy with the initial beginnings of the physical signs of puberty. (His ten-year old younger sister, too!) Next year, he will likely smile at me through peach fuzz and greet me with a crack in his voice. The "baby" in the family is seven, for crying out loud.

And so we celebrate. Each birthday, the honored one chooses the food for each meal. This morning we shared sausage-and-egg casserole and "monkey balls." (Two weeks ago it was tropical fruit salad and cheese danish.) The traditions live on. We work hard to carve the memories deep so they'll stand the ravages of time. Soon they'll leave our sides and no longer will I cook their birthday favorites for them. But for now, for today, while we are still all here together, we'll eat a picnic lunch at Mount Trashmore. We'll sing "Happy Birthday" again over cheesecake after the chosen dinner of London Broil, baked rice, grilled veges, and salad.

As I sit here typing, waiting to head downstairs and put the picnic potato salad together, I think of that "Butterfly Kisses" song by Bob Carlisle. Though it is about a daughter, I hear the lyrics of the bridge in my head every time I get wistful about these fleeting years I'm privileged to experience:

All the precious time. Like the wind, the years go by. Precious butterfly. Spread your wings and fly.

Too soon, it will happen. But for today, there are no tears. Just sesame chicken strips with honey mustard sauce at Kids Cove...

The Single Way

My seven-year old's devotional journal is currently in that "transitional phase" where some of the entries are my own handwriting, scribble-scrawled as I try to grab what she's dictating to me after we've read the lesson together. Other times, they are her own tentative printing and juvenile spelling, working to capture her thoughts without any grown-up scribe to help her.

Today was a "dictation day," and this is what she told me:

If you open your heart wide, Jesus will come into it. The more you ask Him, He will dig out and make the single way. You need to stay to the trunk - its like the trunk is Jesus, and with Him you can grow a bunch of fruit, but if you cut it off, you can't. We need the branch. Like we need Jesus.

"Good, honey. Hey. What's 'the single way' mean?"

"What?"

"You said, 'He will dig out and make the single way.' What's 'the single way'?"

"No, I said, 'He will make the sin go away.'"

Hunh. Pretty profound on either count...

That's Still Me

Yesterday I left my children to a carefully planned-by-me but executed-by-my-parents homeschool day, and my husband whisked me off to a nearby Bed & Breakfast. It was amazing. And I suppose that the thing that most struck me was how "different" was can both seem, away from the pressures of everyday life and work and drudgery. He is so incredible (and so am I!) and yet day-in-and-day-out we are often angry and petty and snippy and grumpy and mean. (Which is the real self, even, actually?!)

Oh, may our children know both of the "real" versions of us!

I think of the Amy Grant song 1974. Such profound lyrics. Such a profound request.

Stay with me. Make it ever new. So time will not undo. As the years go by, how I need to see... That's still me.