when did we
Just home from a walk with a friend–skin flushed with sun; fallen petals from the cherry trees stowaways in my hair, on the edge of my shirt, even precariously crumpled against one sticky ankle–and Riley comes to meet me at the door. I hear her carefully set down whatever she has in her hands; I hear her favorite stool at the bar sliding gracefully back back, her feet soft-footing over the carpet. She comes to ask about my friend, she always does, always first about the people we get to love. How is she, she wants to know.
“You teach me so much about love, Riley,” I say, blinking at the vision of her standing there absently stroking the blond, ropy hanks of her pigtail braids, so long now that they dangle down well past her shoulders. She is never so preoccupied with herself that she wouldn’t rather love someone else.
“Yes, I do Mom,” she says, both because she prefers to agree with me and because she is the only person I know who can accept the genuine truth about herself without false modesty or pride or denial. I tell her she’s beautiful and she always says, “Yes, I am,” but in the next breath she’ll say God made her so, and her tone says these are only facts. Riley begins to love from a position of complete acceptance, both of others and of herself.
I smile and she gushes, a little joy just seeping out the edges, and then, before I can answer her original question she says, “Mom? When did I teach you about love?”
She searches through some mental rolodex for a moment, looking for an interaction between us that literally resembles a lesson. I see it in the tilt of her head, the curiosity in her eyes. She likes the idea of teaching me, but having never set out to teach, she can’t imagine ever doing so. Would she have sat me down at the table or pulled me in her lap like I sometimes still do her? Would she have drawn a picture or written something down–a schedule, maybe? a social story?
“You teach me all the time,” I say to her, “and Adam and Zoe and Dad too. You teach me just by being who you are. You teach me to love by loving people yourself. But really God gives all the lessons.” Really God does all the giving all the time in every occasion; even what we give He gives through us.
I watch her consider this, watch her let it rest, with an accepting nod, though I can see that the lack of concrete memories still baffles her. She reminds me of the righteous ones in Jesus’ story of heavenly judgement, the ones who gave to the Lord but have no memory of doing so; the ones who loved and served everyone in need so naturally that doing so felt unremarkable; the ones who asked, “When did we (Matthew 25:37-39)?” They gave to the Lord without setting out to do so. She teaches me, but she never sets out to do so. And so it goes with those who live love out of the overflow of their hearts. It isn’t some new purposefulness we need but heart surgery, performed by God’s own hands, a change in us that makes love so natural we take no pride in it. What is humility if not the ability to forget ourselves? Because the moment we remember, when we begin to take note, humility drifts away like a mist. And so, perhaps the most effective work of God in us is the work we never set out to do and in the end, the work we won’t be able to remember. That’s the work that feels like no work at all; it flows out of us as easily as an exhaled breath.
She smiles at me now, letting go of what to her must be obtuse, returning to thoughts of my friend.
“So, Mom? How is she?”
