Thursday, December 13, 2012

Keepers

I keep a file in my email inbox called, "Keepers".  It's for the emails that I never want to delete.  Like whenever my Man sends me a little note that shows me he is still completely mad for me.  Into the Keepers file it goes.
My heart is kind of like that this year.  It makes me think of Mary. At least twice in the Gospels we read that "Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart".  I don't really understand all that that means, but I get this much: the moment stuck with her. In that breath, the reality reached the depths of who she was.  
The year is winding down, and as I look back over it, I have treasured up several keepers of my own. 

* Watching my man deal so straightforward and so tenderly with one of our employees who was in pain, that at the end of the talk, all he did was embrace My Man and sob.  Did that make my Bull-Riding, Wildhearted Texas Man pull back? Not a bit.

*  Walking with my kids and watching a man stand in front of his one room hovel, reach out with a piece of bread and offer it to my well-fed, healthy little boy.  

*  Being told by a local  colleague, "I really trust you."

*  Driving home one evening and seeing a boy the same age as Little Aggie asleep on the street cuddled beside his mother.  A normal sight here but it wasn't normal to me this time. This time, I saw my boy reflected in his ebony frame.

*  I once passed a fruit stand where I passed in time to see a nursing baby reach up to touch his mother's face while he ate. My babies did that. That's normal. Not just normal for Africa, normal for America...and Asia and everywhere. We're the same. We're sisters.

* Teaching a zoology lesson on hyenas followed up a couple hours later by a spontaneous discussion with a friend describing to us her first hand account of watching lions and hyenas in Kenya.  The lives people live!


To Be Continued... 

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