Fragile Gift
Yesterday I had a couple of hours to do some Christmas shopping. You can get such a variety of packaging for any gift. Gifts are being wrapped and carefully carried home, hidden, or placed beneath the Christmas tree. Some of the contents are incredibly fragile.
Yet in the midst of this time that seems to be obsessed with "buying gifts" my heart is constantly reminded of those who are holding fragile packages of life in their hands. This photo is Amy - being held for the first time by her Mommy, when she was almost a month old. She was such a fragile delicate package of life - only 10 months were on this earth. Amy is my niece.
During this season of festivity and laughter there are those who are painfully spending the last precious moments of life with those who are weak and fragile. There may be only moments, or days, or months of that left, and those with them are spending Christmas keeping watch as life slips away. Perhaps it is a son or daughter by the bed of a parent, or a parent at the bedside of a child. It could be a volunteer beside someone who has no family or a friend sitting with one who has meant so much to them. Husbands and wives - one of them slipping away from life. How do you hold this package that is filled with pain and longing, and you are powerless to keep it in your hands?
I have no children of my own but within me is a mother's heart that aches for those in pain. Within me is God's heart beat that is both mother and father. And perhaps it is those Divine hands that hold the most fragile packages of life at this time - a father's hand and a mother's hand. Henri Nouwen describes these hands of the Almighty in his book "The Return of the Prodigal Son":
"The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches the son with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He holds, she caresses. He confirms and she consoles. He is, indeed, God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present." Pg 99 Return of the Prodigal Son
I remember the week I sat with my friend Edith as she died - a gift that will be in my heart for a lifetime.
Those father and mother hands of Abba hold the living and the dying - I pray comfort in this season of holding fragile packages of life, no matter what race or religion you are, whether you have a faith or not. Life is still a fragile gift to be held in our hands.