Tuesday, October 12, 2010

A Thanksgiving Blessing

On Sunday morning, I was sitting in the Thanksgiving service at our church...grumpy.  Matthew was having a difficult morning, thanks to three too-late nights and the subsequent too-early mornings, and Geoff had taken him out of the service in order to distract him for a while.  I was doing my best to be in a thankful frame of mind, but it wasn't working.  At all.  I was fuming, in fact, because Thanksgiving is one of my favourite times of year, and it seemed wrecked for me.  Childishly, I wanted to leave, to sulk, to hibernate in the car until the morning was done.

Had I done that, I would have missed the moment that turned my day around.  Sitting there, arms crossed over my chest, I heard the sound of laughter.  It was a child's voice, and the laugh was one of those from-the-belly laughs that can only come from the innocent.  The kind of laugh that I usually find so contagious.  But this time, I just got more annoyed, thinking that the loudness of the laughter was disruptive.  Shows you what kind of mood I was in.  Worse, it was coming closer and closer, quickly.  All of the sudden, two boys ran into the aisle directly in front of me.  The younger was about three and the older about five.  Clearly brothers, and clearly Ethiopian-born.  Soo beautiful.

It was the little one that was laughing.  His whole face was lit up with the joy of whatever was going on inside of him.  Maybe it was the chase that he loved, because his older brother was just a hair's breath behind him, trying to catch him and constantly shushing him.  But the belly laughs kept coming, rounded and carefree.  After hesitating a moment right in front of me, after looking right into my eyes for a split second, the boys took off down the adjoining aisle that led them towards the front of the church, where they were nabbed by their mother.  The laughter stopped mid-chortle.

My whole morning changed in those few seconds.  It's hard to explain.  When I caught my first glimpse of the boys as they came around the corner and down the aisle in front of me, my first thought was to wonder whether these were my boys.  I wanted them to be my boys.  It felt like God was saying something to me.  They were so real, so full of life.  In the moment that they stopped in front of me and glanced my way, I wanted them to be looking at me as their mama, the one who would take them home shortly.

It was a moment of such intense longing.  And it did change my grumpiness into something quite different.  I was pretty quiet on the drive home a while later, thinking it through.  I really, really wanted that to be a foreshadowing of my own future.  Where it's my third child running around with that beautifully disruptive belly laugh, and where it's my second child who's trying to hush him.  Where it's my mama's arm snaking out to grab my little delinquents and settling them back down with me.  Ahh, I can picture that so easily.  May it come to pass.

8 comments:

  1. I so hope you get to experience that by next Thanksgiving Ruth.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking forward to that day, Ruth! May it come soon!

    ReplyDelete
  3. from your lips to God's ears. May it be so.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ruth - I'm so sorry for your longing. You have expressed it so well in this post, particularly because the description of the moment in church was so vivid. Hang on my dear. Where you are right now reminds me of a South African song I'm learning in community choir, "Bambalayla," which means "never give up!"

    ReplyDelete
  5. I was going to get a few groceries to take to my in-laws on Sunday morning and as I walked across the parking lot, I saw a mom and a very clearly adopted, beautiful, African daughter. I stopped in my tracks in the middle of the roadway and was instantly transformed to a place of that being me. They walked up to the front of the store and started sorting through the pumpkins, looking, I suspect for the perfect halloween pumpkin. I was, for a moment, hopeful about my own future pumpkin picking days together with my children... I ended up less inspired than you were in your moment (I will confess to a few tears in the parking lot), but I was thankful for the joy that was obvious in that mom and her daughter. These are the moments... thinking of you often. A

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thinking of you and looking forward to the good things to come for you.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh Ruth.... I'm so sorry... such a lot of love and longing and pain. I can imagine that it's feeling like it's already been forever, and another big stretch of forever is ahead. But it WILL soon be your second and third children running around causing a big ruckus. The day WILL come. Hang in there my friend. xoxo

    ReplyDelete