just listen

“What do you appreciate about your mom?” Kevin asks the kids on Mother’s Day, while we sit in the booth thumbing the laminated menus, waiting for the server to reappear and take our order for lunch. I shift uncomfortably, looking away, sliding my hands against the red vinyl booth, feeling that it will burden them to have to construct a verbal list, feeling sure there’s nothing really remarkable enough to mention. Kevin slides over closer, putting his arm around my shoulders.

God and I, we have this ongoing conversation, but not with words. He speaks my language, but also another one I don’t quite fully understand. I don’t hear an audible voice, at least not the kind heard through mortal ears or manufactured by human vocal cords and the human mouth. God doesn’t sound like Morgan Freeman, at least not to me, but speaks through a knowing that is other than me but also within me. I think of Adam and me, of the way Autism makes communication different, of the way we read each other’s eyes. God reads me; only better for being able to see all the way into my heart. But that’s where the comparison ends. He’s ineffable, calling Himself I AM to help me understand, using a name that sounds simple but is really quite vast.

For a long time now, God, sovereign and intimate, has been teaching me how to receive love, because, as we all know, love has been bungled in all of us. Either we struggle to give love or we struggle to receive it, and most of us struggle to do both. And I don’t measure value the way God does; sometimes I reject His assessment of things, sometimes I don’t even realize I’m doing it. So at this moment, when I’m thinking the kids will need to make up an answer to Kevin’s question, that they won’t have anything to say, God says, just listen. He sends Kevin sliding over the vinyl and close to me, which is to say, Just look: you’re surrounded by love.

I glance at Kevin and he smiles, and I look at my kids, the three of them grown and comfortable, warm and kind and naturally disheveled. The imperfection of the angles, the lines of them, is beautiful to me. Haphazardness, that freedom exploding the boundaries of skin and bone, is authentic to the human condition. Sometimes I wonder why we work so hard denying it. We are souls with bodies, sitting together in this half-moon booth, and it’s true: I’m surrounded by love. It’s physically true, because I feel them–the pulse, the breath, the throb of life–on either side of me, and it’s spiritually true, because God is omnipresent. He inhabits my soul, even my cells. I’m surrounded by love, and I’m filled with it. Just listen, God says. Riley tilts her head and immediately begins, “Okay, what I appreciate about Mom is…” She lifts her hands and pulls back each finger as she talks, like she’s counting, like somehow I am not one blessing but many. I remember being mesmerized by those hands when they were new; counting all ten of those tiny fingers, knuckles no bigger than dots.

You will be a blessing, God reminds, borrowing the ancient promise He made to Abraham.

She mentions unremarkable things–just listen, just listen:

“…her hugs; and the way she braids my hair; and how she snuggles up next to me at night to watch TV; and how she gets my breakfast and my pills and helps me get ready for school…”

I say these are the remarkable things.

I told you: I reject God’s assessment of value–how different it is from my own!–and sometimes I don’t realize I’m doing it. I’ve been a mother for twenty-one years, and I’m still figuring out that the most important things I do every day don’t fit on any list. God says that the greatest, most enduring activity of all is love and that the greatest commands are to love God and to love others. “Do this and you will live,” Jesus said (Luke 10:28). And the choice to love; even as the sacrifice of comfort, even as a risk, even as the loss of ownership over life (there it is, the cross), seems to be the difference between conducting mindless routines and living fully. This is the legacy I have, to receive love and to give love, and if this is the work of my hands–hugs and braids and affection and nourishing and equipping, then I live a life that lasts. Or so I’m learning.

I listen to Riley listing things I never would, without hesitation, without burden, without stopping–she seems to have an endless set of fingers, and it astounds me to know that love does this, that it penetrates seemingly simple things and makes them entirely vast. Somewhere in the middle of the list, while I’m looking at Riley’s beautiful smile, taking in the glint of joy in her eyes, I realize that these are not for her merely things I do. This is who I am to her, this list of blessings, of grace upon grace upon grace, and that’s when I see that God has succeeded already, even as He continues with me. Because He is who He is, He has made me more than I am. The miracle repeats: Again He takes my five loaves and two fish, and in the way that only He can, makes them enough to feed a multitude.

Thank you. My gratitude passes between us, not words, not even a whisper.