Showing posts with label : god. Show all posts
Showing posts with label : god. Show all posts

Monday 21 January 2013

Coming Around Full Circle


ccf02272012_00015When you were 16, what did you think your life would look like? Does it look like that? Is that a good thing?

Outwardly, my life is diametrically opposed  to anything I could have imagined as a teenager. Yet this strange life I find myself living has brought me more fulfilment and joy than I ever could have imagined.
At sixteen, I was still an avid reader, who loved school.   As  expected, I completed an Honours Degree in English Literature. By 23, my life was still on track. I considered continuing my studies as a graduate student because I still loved everything about academia.  The relaxed but challenging experience of reading Chaucer and Old English in the original vernacular with only one other student in a professor's office was invigorating. This teacher was delighted to find two students interested in his life's work
I loved my life and didn't for see any changes. I had grown up with one sister, ballet lessons and a library filled with great fiction. I enjoyed gardening, painting and drawing, eating a vegetarian diet, reading spiritual literature and growing in my faith ; I was content.
Suddenly, my life as I knew it, changed dramatically.
I met Michael, who was just passing through Regina, Saskatchewan from Ottawa, Ontario to Prince George, British Columbia and from that very first, it felt like the prairie wind had swooped down and scattered all my work and plans. Michael described our first meeting in much kinder terms;   he saw fireworks when he first laid eyes on me.
I was not ready for this dramatic change in my life but it was clear to me that this was my call. So I baffled my fellow students, profs, advisors, friends and family by saying yes to the unexpected. I did not know anything about my newly chosen lifestyle or even where we would live. I did realize that I was completely ignorant and lacked even the most basic skills required to survive.
I became pregnant before our first wedding anniversary. Instantly, I began to panic because I knew, that once again, I was utterly unprepared. I had never even held a newborn! So I prepared in the only way I knew how and I read every book I could find on pregnancy, birth and baby care.
However all this studying did little to equip me to mother a fragile, completely dependent newborn. For example, as I held my baby in a small bathtub for his first bath, I was very nervous. Guess what? I had a book propped open with one elbow awkwardly holding it open to the right page, while my baby was in the baby bathtub on the table. The book was my security blanket. In fact reading at any odd moment I could grab a few seconds , strong cups of tea plus the mercy of God  and a wicked sense of humour have been my strength.
In the ensuing years, 18 spent pregnant and/or nursing babies,  I discovered fulfilment. My call, vocation and witness became the joy of mothering children. Perhaps I could have started  writing seven years ago when everyone was in school full-time but realistically there was simply too much physical work involved in running a household for eleven people and helping with the farm animals and our large vegetable garden.
Now I  have come around full circle because I  have started writing again. Just as I imagined at 16.  It just took 40 years of living a strange life before this avid reader and crazy oral story-teller was ready to start writing.

I had to smile through the whole thing, Melanie. I believe that God had plans for you from even before you met the love of your life. Your story, how you became a wife and then a mother, is so beautiful. I don't think I could tire reading it. :)

Maybe that is the beauty and mystery of life...that we do have a destiny to fulfil and often are not aware of it till it happens...

Wednesday 12 December 2012

The Shock of the Nativity Scene


Credit: ifoodtv
God's vulnerability
The manger scene is a startling image of the vulnerability of God who became an infant.
This season we contemplate the nativity scene and the image of Mary holding the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords in her arms as a tiny, vulnerable infant.
We should be shocked at the extent of His humility when He came to live among as us a man, beginning His time on earth as a baby in a barn, surrounded by unwashed animals and the smell of manure. Mary, as the mother of God, revealed a mother's love as she nursed and cared for Jesus. He was completely dependent on this girl to meet all of His needs. Actually He willingly placed His life in the hands of a thirteen to fifteen-year old kid. Perhaps Jesus's trust was based on the powerful love that God has placed in every mother's heart for her baby.
I am reminded of a quote.
"The loveliest masterpiece of the heart of God is the heart of a mother."- St Therese of Liseux
This Christmas, look at every mother with new eyes and let her remind you of the nativity scene and the One who entrusted His life to the loving care of a teen mum.