Friday, January 12, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Watch the kids take care of things
If you are four and you are endangered (slightly) by something your seven year old brother does, what do you say? How do you respond?
Our four-year-old got right in the face of his brother and shouted, “No! That’s not appropriate!” Sometimes his words come out a little fuzzy, but this time neither his face nor his voice were uncertain. Wham!
I think his brother was paralyzed a little. He couldn’t look away. When he didn’t say anything, our little guy said it again. Staring right into his brothers eyes.
“That was not appropriate!” Then again, and again. He didn’t look away. And then his brother apologized. Wow!
Immediately they resumed playing together, as they had been all morning, inside and outside (it was 70 degrees in Austin yesterday). They helped mash potatoes for lunch, read to each other, built structures out of whatever we had around, and played, finally, with a new remote control car, which toppled over perfectly but didn’t go straight very well at all.
We ate corn on the cob and hot dogs, and cookies and pieces of an orange chocolate ball. I read stories and Margaret helped with homework. With a magnet, the 7-year-old found a bunch of screws and nails scattered around our apartment grass. He felt like a hero. He kind of was.
And then, as always, they went home. It’s great to be grandparents with two lives, one with those kiddoes and one on our own. After they left I thought of words from Henri Nouwen, words about my heart. My heart craves companionship and it also hungers for solitude and silence. And God provides both, with himself and with those around us:
 In the biblical understanding, our heart is at the center of our being. It’s not a muscle, but a symbol for the very center of our being. Now the beautiful thing about the heart is that the heart is the place where we are most ourselves. It is the very core of our being, the spiritual center of our being. Solitude and silence, for instance, are ways to get to the heart, because the heart is the place where God speaks to us, where we hear the voice that calls us beloved. This is precisely the most intimate place. In the famous story, Elijah was standing in front of the cave. God was not in the storm, God was not in the fire and not in the earthquake, but God was in that soft little voice (see 1 Kings 19: 11–12). That soft little voice … speaks to the heart. Prayer and solitude are ways to listen to the voice that speaks to our heart, in the center of our being. One of the most amazing things is that if you enter deeper and deeper into that place, you not only meet God, but you meet the whole world there.
Our “whole world” is rich. It’s rich with friends from church, it’s rich with our grandkids and their parents in Illinois and in Austin, it’s rich with people we don’t know but are responsive when we speak to them. God makes this happen for us, just as he did when he walked the roads of Galilee.
Jesus saw Levi, sitting at the customs post. Jesus said to this tax collector, “Follow me,” and Levi got up and followed Jesus.
Just like that.
(1 Samuel 8, Psalm 89, Luke 7, Mark 2)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
