Good morning…
After a full night’s sleep, I wake in the guest room of my parent’s villa in the Renaissance senior living community near my hometown of Berea, Ohio. The walls here are filled with pictures our of our extended family growing up over the years. Two of my favorite photo collages live in this room, a frame of my dad (a retired administrator at Berea High) giving high school diplomas to me, my older sister and my younger brother years ago. And a framed photo of three of our four kids eating popsicles with their cousins sitting on a canoe outside my parents’ old home. What great memories!
Fast forward to yesterday. We enjoyed a relaxing 84th birthday with my mom. After being picked up at the airport, I hopped in the car with my parents and, enjoying a leisurely drive, we stopped on the shore of Lake Erie to watch the windy whitecaps on the water on our way to Costco. As my dad went into the store, I talked with my mom, whose broken femur is immobilized in a large leg brace, about what they might do now that the insurance is abruptly stopping payment for her treatment (working through the anxious uncertainty with my mom and my dad has been a hard privilege.) After a small, simple lunch, my dad and I walked the nature trail while my mom did physical therapy. Then we brought her back to the villa, where each of us enjoyed a wonderful nap before meeting my brother out for a birthday dinner at my parents’ favorite Mexican restaurant. What great memories!
As I wake late on this new morning, I enjoy the phone messages rolling in from my immediate family from across the globe. “Me and Henry went on a 14 mile hike today,” our 21-year-old son sent pictures from Steamboat Springs, Colorado where he is working this summer with five of his buddies. What great memories!
Our daughter, who is ministering in Africa to college students in Zambia, texted: “Sunset pic from the other day in Africa.” (See the first gorgeous picture below.) And my husband sent the next breathtaking photo from Israel with the caption, “Sunrise on Masada.” What great memories!
Then our oldest daughter wrote privately, sharing with me and our oldest son a lesson she is learning in her quiet time with God. “Remember, ‘knowing’ in the Bible is not merely cognitive. It is profoundly relational,” writes Dane Ortlund in Deeper. “Even sexual intimacy is described as a man ‘knowing’ his wife. As Jonathan Edwards famously put it, you can ‘know’ honey in two distinct ways: you can know the exact chemical makeup of honey; or you can taste it. Both are ways we can ‘know’ honey. But only the latter is the knowledge by which honey is experienced.”
Memories can be “known” as old faraway facts and “What great memories!” can be “known” as a delicious daily taste of God’s eternal love. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:16-19, NIV).
…Sue…
