The History of a Family Love

Love the picture; love the stairs.  These were stairs much older than me, photographed at the Atlanta History Museum near Buckhead.  The home so beautiful was literally full to the brim with life once lived.

Generations ago, children ran up and down these stairs.  A Grandmother watched them from the windows, being too refined to join in their play but not too stoic that she felt any need to stop them.

I wonder if the home I am thinking of this morning will be looked at with as much awe as I stared at stairs, at doors, at stone work - wondering and imagining the lives that so haphazardly were lived here.  I know these lives were lived, as if unaffected by what happens to others as human beings would ever happen to them. 

When you live life, you don't think of the days when you won't.  You don't think of the stairs you will never climb again.  The water fountains you will never swim in again.  The floors you will never click and clack across with heels on.

The people who lived here don't anymore.

But when they did...

THEY DID.

That's what I want to happen after December 2012 has passed...when we are busy building a life combined and conjoined. 

I want my home to be the place where he and I will be so intertwined with the art cabana, the blue music room, the knotted pine library, the kitchen of many meals cooked, the fire pit outside, the well-used fireplace inside - that when our great, great, great grandchildren receive it in inheritance, they will know we loved.  We loved and lived here.  That will be felt and remembered long after our practiced wealth will transfer into the eternal gain of living in God's rich Presence.

That will be their history...their historical society..their history museum.  That will be their inheritance.

When I remember my grandparents, I don't think of the house that doesn't exist anymore on Thomas Street in Grand Rapids.  I don't consider where everything used to be.  It was not as beauteous as this home my friend and I toured a warm day in July.  But it was home.

It is remembered.  Never forgotten.

Like cemented history and blue doors...

I remember the inheritance of love.

If life is nothing else, that is the definitive purpose of breathing.

Happiness, Simply Put

He laughs, though not audibly.  Such a tiny little dog, his silent laughter rings truer than anything I have ever known.  How can he be so happy?  I can ask the question, but I already know the answer.

Nothing is better than simply being alive.

And my Barklee's smile is what lets me know that, there is absolutely no excuse to be frowning.  It does it to me every time.

Watching the Sunrise

I didn't realize until a few months ago that the best way to greet the day, at least for me, is to greet the sun as it rises in the Eastern sky. It is a brief moment in time that if you are not looking carefully, you can miss. You can miss the sweet instant when new bright sun rays kiss sky and a day never before seen begins on earth. It is not just another day.

Like God's grace and mercy being new every morning, the sun slowly creeping up from the horizon, is significant because the way it arrives has never been seen in quite that way. Yes, it is the same sun as yesterday. Yes it will shine down and warm the skin. Yes, it will be the light to the day, so that we do not have to live in darkness.

Like the grace we take for granted sometimes, that sun is ever present. But what is not is the awareness that eyes are seeing it new again for another day. The sun is being born right before our eyes. If we pay attention, we will remember that the same God that made the same sun that gave the same grace as yesterday will keep us today and the acknowledgement we would do well to give makes everything more bearable.

Rain will come.

Mercy will be needed.

Grace will need to be extended for those who fail us and for each of us when we fail, at even the simplest tasks.

But behind the clouds is the sun that always comes back. Behind the issues that cloud our human nature and our restrictive view, grace and mercy always come back.

This day is a God-given day with blessings, challenges, heartache, love, pain, worries, and release. We rejoice in it when we know, first, that we were blessed to see it. And second, we rejoice because the old shines new.

I sit here now, every morning racing to beat the sun-streaks across the sky that signal that the fire ball in the sky is about to be reborn; it is about to make a grand appearance in a brief moment that can easily be missed. I don't want to miss anymore moments.

And I begin my day determined not to.