LOVING QUIETLY

I live. I mother. I wife.  I lawyer. I daughter.  I sister, and I friend.  All those non verbs, all those things that I am, demand that I do.  So I cook, clean, love, make love, talk, cry, help, read, analyze, marvel, think, process, make decisions, raise teenagers, cry some more, kiss my husband, laugh, dance with my children, and the list could go on touching most every verb in Webster’s Dictionary from Aa through Zz. My life is far from quiet. It is a continual melding of activities and blending of significant and peripheral people’s lives into mine and mine into theirs. But in the past two months, my life has been pushed into a period of reflection simply because many markers have suddenly appeared on my life‘s road. Suddenly, not as in unexpected.  Suddenly, as in, “wow, am I already this far along on the journey?” 

For instance, my husband and I celebrated twenty years of married bliss…and we thought about our first date, first kiss and first night.  Our daughter went back for another year of college...fraught with all the tension that the process of finding and forming identity brings.  Our twin sons turned 15 and it was easy to think back to holding them at the Chiang mai airport for the first time face to face. Our second daughter is thinking through college choices and mapping her career. My father had a stroke and this very intelligent man who speaks at least three languages fluently, now tells my sister that his hand is a fox. My mother is learning to live a new normal after 60 years of intimate and day to day conversations with her husband who is now significantly hampered in his ability to communicate.  My routine now consists of regular drives to Cleveland with many monotonous miles of highway on which to think and reflect.

This is what I have been thinking today: that my Father in heaven has often been, and is now, often very quiet in His love for me. What I mean is that He is so often not flashy in the ways He demonstrates love for me. I thought about this when my daughter mentioned something about a gift she had been given and was asking me if I remembered any conversations which would have set the giving of the gift in motion. Ah, my maternal pride would have loved to say “yes, I was totally behind it.” But I could not honestly say that. And I simply had to admit: “sometimes the Lord is just quiet in the ways He loves us.”  Sometimes, He leaves no calling card, no gift card other than the gift itself. And He leaves it up to us to trace the gift to the Giver.

Why?  Why not have flash and bang and sis boom bah when He leaves the gift?  A little gift card that unabashedly and incontrovertibly announces: “To: Ellen,  Love: God.”  It makes things so much easier at bridal showers, for instance, when someone sits beside the bride to be. This person’s sole duty is to meticulously and carefully keep track of who gave what. That way no giver will feel unappreciated or unloved. In fact, nowadays, the givers all receive little note cards, prestamped with the bride to be’s return address already written,  on which the giver writes her address, so as to make it easy for the bride to be. Why doesn’t God make it that easy and just leave His prestamped, self-addressed calling card or gift card along with every gift? Why risk being unappreciated and unloved or why not get acknowledged?

I think it is because the gift card mandates “thank me.”  But, when our precious Father in heaven quietly leaves a gift it says “seek me.”  We start the process of tracing the gift to the Giver and coming face to face, we can say to Him, “thank you…I didn’t realize it was you. But now I see.” 

I know that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” (James 1:17) But sometimes, in the midst of verbs and doing, I forget that thanking does not always lead to seeking Him, but seeking Him and finding Him as the giver of every good and perfect gift does lead to thanking Him.