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This Saturday will be the next step in a season of some pretty intense generational shifts for us. More on that tomorrow. I wrote the following article ten years ago, during another such season. It only seems like yesterday…
The voice on the phone was tired and quiet – not unusual for a hospital room at 9:20 pm. They’d just gotten Lou (my grandmother) settled down for the night when I’d made my untimely call. The occasion, other than to check on Lou, was to wish Mamma a happy 60th birthday. A little ironic that I had to track her down at Providence Hospital where she was watching her mother edge closer to death.
Life is filled with choices and changes, and my mom has seen her share of them. But perhaps never with the magnitude and frequency of change she faces now. Her mother has cancer, and is losing the battle. Her son lives many hours away. And up the highway a couple of hours, her daughter prepares for the Big One. She’s preparing to leave the country for the mission field.
On this night, I enjoy a feminine family reunion by telephone. I speak briefly to Lou, to tell her I am thinking of her, loving her, praying for her. I hear the pain, the despair, the fear in her voice. That growing sense of hopelessness that says, “I don’t feel good and I probably never will again.”
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I’ve said it often in church life: there is nothing more useless (and sometimes obnoxious) than a new grandparent.
Uh huh.
So anyway…
Amazing creatures, these babies – resting peacefully in somebody’s eager arms or lying in the bed, quietly watching the world go by. Filled with wonder at times, filling the room with noise at times. Innocent and defenseless, yet powerful enough to hold your heart in their tiny hands. So capable of needing and being needed, even before she takes her first nap. Babies! I realized the other day how long it had been since I had held one, or played with one. I remembered how little we still truly know about them.
How does God do that anyway? How can one life be created in the image of two, a miniature version of her Mommy and Daddy? How can she be so unable to care for herself, yet totally equipped to learn, to grow, and to develop? What’s really going through her mind as she lies there quietly? What will she become one day? Will she be a woman or a witch, an angel or a devil? We talk of “accidents,” but God never does. What does God have in mind for her? How much of God will she ever truly experience? What kind of God will she see in me? Or in her parents?
“But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4).
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Here’s what Jane’s Hambleton’s classified ad read:
“OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.”
Her phone lit up, as you might imagine. Nobody wanted to buy the car, but everybody wanted to talk to Jane.
Know why? [click to continue…]
