We are waiting.

Psalm 27:14--"Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" Oh, Lord, we are waiting. We need your strength and courage.

Waiting does not get easier with age.

My beautiful life

Finding the beautiful in the midst of trouble, pain, or difficulty has been a focus of this blog. Sometimes the beautiful is only seen in retrospect. During our visit with Erin over the past week, much of Carl's time and energy was consumed with finding a remedy for the dryer situation--too long of a story to relate here. Suffice it to say, Erin purchased a supposedly working used dryer, and after much toil and trouble and with the assurance from her maintenance man that the problem was with the dryer and not with the electrical outlet, was unable to get it to work. So the dryer sat unused beside the washer for three or four months. Carl's goal was to provide a working dryer one way or another for Erin's Christmas present. The dryer fiasco, as it deserves to be called, brought us right up to the last night of our visit. After a lovely dinner out at Red Lobster, we went back to Erin's apartment, and Carl started to install the new dryer he had purchased that afternoon at Home Depot. So began a three hour descent to purgatory for Carl which culminated in discovering that the maintenance man had misled Erin--the outlet, in fact, was not even properly wired and was the source of the problem. In the midst of this misadventure, we females began as assistants in the process--helping to move the two dryers, passing tools, etc., but ended up distancing ourselves from a very frustrated man as there was nothing we could say or do that would improve the situation. That is how I ended up reclining on the hide-a-bed with my two daughters, reading and talking. I don't even remember now how the conversation turned to Old Testament stories, but somehow the story of Jacob and Esau came up, and Erin asked me to tell the story. So I briefly related the story of those two conflicted brothers as I snuggled with girls and dogs. When the story came to an end, Erin, in little girl mode, said, "Tell me another story, Mommy." I laughed and said that I wasn't a good story-teller and didn't know what to tell. She said to tell the story of Ruth or Esther--that Ruth was her favorite story in the Bible--that she used to read it when she was bored in church. So I started at the beginning as that starving family from Israel sought sustenance in a pagan land. With my limited writing ability, there is no way to describe that visceral experience of telling the compelling story of Ruth, feeling again the significance of the grace of God oozing out of that tale, and having my once wayward daughter join me in unison as I came to the part where Ruth said, "Your people will be my people, and your God will be  my God."

So often over the course of my life as a mother, I have resonated with the words said of Mary that she "treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart." Here is one more memory that I am savoring and pondering in my heart, a memory that in the moment seemed overshadowed by the trouble with the dryer, yet in retrospect, was a heaven kissed moment that I will always treasure. What a beautiful life I have!