In response to the e-mails I have received from the column last month, I would like to add another thought.
I remember so well playing with our two sons on that particular evening years ago. They liked to lie down on the floor, put their feet in the air and have me pick them up by the ankles and swing them around. After a while Patrick tired of it and went back to the television. Eric never seemed to tire of it. "More, Daddy, more," he would say. And so Daddy picked him up and swung him until my arms insisted on "no more."
It was a fun evening. Karen got home from choir practice, we popped some popcorn and enjoyed the time together. It was a good evening. It was a relaxed evening. Of course, we were not to know that it was to be our last evening together. An accident would take Eric's life.
That last evening has become for me a sacred evening. Those moments together,our last moments, are sacred moments.
This raises the obvious question: if Eric had not died, would those moments have been any less sacred? Of course not. The only difference is that I would not have looked on them as being as rich and deep and valuable as in fact they were. I would have missed seeing the beauty of that wonderful time together.
Life is filled with just such moments. In the midst of the boring and the mundane there are scattered throughout our lives sacred moments-moments when God's grace is felt and known.
These are moments when we can identify with Jacob as he spoke to his brother Esau, "for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God." We each have been there-so often.
We have looked into the loving eyes of our children as they felt, and sometimes voiced, their appreciation for our being there for them. We have felt the grace when our spouses overlooked the wrong they had every right to have held against us. Or perhaps it was just a delightful family evening enjoying those who matter the most, popping popcorn and kicking back. We have had countless moments when in the faces of those we love it was "like seeing the face of God."
Perhaps the losses we experience in life help us recognize these precious times with those we love-to value them and make the most of them. It was Tennyson who wrote, "Though much is taken, much abides."
At our home we have moved on with a new clarity of what truly matters in life and what does not. We see through that glass less darkly with an awareness of how sacred life, and each of its precious moments, really is. We tend to hug those we love a little tighter and a lot more often.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it so beautifully as she borrows the image of Moses at the burning bush:
"Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes."
Ron Greer is pastoral counselor with the Pastoral Counseling Service at Peachtree Road UMC in Atlanta. He can be reached at [email protected].
