1.
Today it is the fact that I'm sitting on my green velvet couch, a mug of coffee tucked between my outer thigh and the armest. The dog's head keeps flopping over my lap like he's drugged, his nose pressing down keys on the computer in the middle of my sentences. lj,kljnkljil. I don't delete those because I want to remember.
2.
Some days it's the sound of the piano being plucked and hammered by seven-year-old fingers, it's the glowing coals in the fireplace, it's red apples on the counter, it's the nightlight glowing under their door, it's the swale in the pillow where I know he'll sleep next to me tonight.
3.
Have you ever thought to yourself like I have, "I shouldn't need anything, I have Christ?" But Paul needed his coat and books so much he wrote to Timothy and asked him to deliver them and God deemed it should make it into holy scriptures—so cannot I ask for coffee and my dog's head resting in my lap.
Paul was so ordinary.
Perhaps ordinary is more sacred than we think.
4.
It's my daughter's body, alive and warm and relaxed on my lap. It's the snow a foot high outside my door, still untouched, and barring some brave animals foraging for food, it's knowing it is this way for miles and miles and miles. It's them asking, "How many days until my birthday?" 364 days a year. It's the darkness outside while I read my Bible and its insistence that I am loved and a part of something so big, so boundless, so utterly beautiful that it keeps me going for another day.
5.
Have you ever thought about how we cannot touch God who is our greatest comfort but we can touch all these other great things? We can run our hands over our son's soft cheek, the purple knit blanket made by our great-grandmother-in-law, the ceramic mug our father's hands made, even as they shook with Parkinson's. Maybe they are like touching God.
6.
Stop clutching your pearls, you understand what I mean. You cannot tell me you've never thought about Eve hugging God? Mary hugging Jesus? What must that have been like? Someday you'll know. For now, we have cheeks and blankets and mugs and this is enough and let's pray we are brave enough to accept them while we do.
