Marveling at the Light

The other day my 4 year old woke me up with a conspiratorial whisper, “Mom, come quick, I want you to see something.” Begrudgingly, I emerged from beneath the cocoon of warm covers and followed him downstairs. “Close your eyes,” he said with the flourish of a magician as he climbed up on the living room couch to get closer to our front window.

“Now, look, mommy! Do you see the colors?”  The sky was aflame with morning glory. Pink tinged the edges of the sunrise flames, like a halo. Seeing it through my winter tree limbs reminded me of Moses and his burning bush. He was right; it was a sunrise worth waking up to see.

But what struck me later on about it is that he is now stopping to notice the colors, because I regularly stop to notice them with him. Especially, as I’ve been learning to paint, I find myself paying more attention to the gradation of colors in the leaves, or the particular pattern of clouds in a herringbone sky, or how the shadows fall in the glow of the afternoon light. And now, in his own way, he is calling me to see what I have taught him to notice. 

The other night at the playground he said he wanted to stay and watch the sunset with me. A few weeks before that he pulled me out on the back porch on a nippy fall evening to “cuddle up and see the colors,” as he described the last colors of the day. And this is because I have so often been caught up in such beauty and I have pulled this little child of my heart into my delight. 

And then like an afternoon thundershower, I felt drenched in realization. This is how we teach them to love Jesus. It’s them catching my delight in belting out praise songs in the car when no one else is watching; it’s them hearing the tenderness in how I talk to God and thank him for being such a good, good Father to us; it’s them seeing how I linger over God’s word on a Saturday morning when there’s mundane things calling for my attention; and hopefully it’s a million along-the-way moments of spoken aloud wonder, instruction, insight, or thanksgiving. 

I’ve been reading this advent season from a book of poems edited by Malcom Guite called Waiting on the Word. One of the poems that struck me recently was called The Moons by Grevel Lindup. The narrator of the poem notes all the quarters, halves and slices of moon seen over the years. And wonders aloud:

“How many times did you call me from the house,

Or from my desk to the window, just to see?

Should I string them all on a necklace for you?

Impossible, though you gave them all to me.”

It’s a lovely reminder of the beauty of a shared moment. The remembered moons, like so many shiny iridescent shavings of memory, become like an adornment, a necklace– a gift. I’m certainly wearing close to my heart all the shiny shards of sunrises and sunsets my little one has collected for me. I pray that I can likewise collect so many luminous moments of my delight in God and pass them on to my children. Perhaps one day, if my prayers are answered, they will gather their own luminescent wonders of God’s goodness and give them to me like a necklace of shards of sunrise and medallions of harvest moons.