Sudden Wonder

A lovely, soft photo popped up in the images scrolling by me yesterday that made me pause for the beauty of it. It was posted by a loving dad. It looked to me as though he had quietly slipped into the room where his daughter was hard at work, oblivious of all except her sketch pad and her pencil. Her teacher was very near her doing the same. They were silently drawing in the soft afternoon light from the window.

If a photo could talk it would seep with a father's swift intake awe at catching this kind of magic as he opened the door. His daughter. His daughter that he knew as a baby until now. Familiar as the back of his hand and yet....a mysterious being all her own with a world of images, thoughts, and songs being born every day within her that he would only catch like this once in a magical while. This lovely being he had given as gift to the world by saying yes to life.

I don't think we realize what we are fully doing when we have children. What a glorious thing God is asking us to do. These gifts of autonomous beauty. Our love brings them into the world, our love feeds and clothes them. But then we get to watch this mysterious rose unfold in some strange "out of time" between the chaos of daily living: cereal spilled, tantrums maybe, wrestling, singing, goofiness. Then suddenly we see it: a look, a pencil drawing busily, a poem slipped from a hand to the floor half written in the inspiration the night before. A daughter singing like a lark in the church choir, a son writing a story filled with a deeper feeling you never suspected was there. A face over a book in the corner by the window moved to tears at what is being read there. And you realize: God asked me to do this. To bring this beauty into the world. This child who is the mirror to me right at this instant of God's creative benevolence. Pure gift. It is a wonder.

That is what that simple moment caught by a father said to me. I was struck by a similar scene caught and painted by artist Berthe Morisot of her daughter Julia.

She too probably saw, with sudden awe, the artist blooming in her own daughter - who would have her own style, her own insights, her own inscapes of life. It is a striking little painting. I stayed and studied it a long while. It has a kind of magic that you are suddenly privy to. As if to say - love your children and wait for the beauty they will each eventually reveal.

It is what I thought when I first saw each of my grandsons for the first time. These are of my son Thomas and his wife Bibi - but they are also not. They are going to reveal to us a whole different dimension of God - with their portion of God's creative beauty poured into their souls.

I wish for them many moments of awe. I wish them a quiet capture that a father held forever in his memory of a daughter quietly at work on her sketch pad in the gentleness of the afternoon sun falling through a window.

Deo Gratias.

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