Across the table, I listen to her talk; this daughter of mine who has grown into a beautiful rendering of God’s lovingkindness.  Laurel green eyes shining through porcelain skin and hair cascading over one shoulder; she captivates my mother’s heart, not because she is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, but because she illustrates what it means to be fearfully and wonderfully made by the Creator.

And sometimes I need reminding that this is how Jesus looks at you and me across the kitchen table.

After pancakes and coffee, our stomachs are satiated and hearts full of meaningful connection. At the kitchen sink, I scrape plates while she stands opposite, continuing our grown up conversation. When I suggest a shopping excursion, she replies with typical thoughtfulness toward others.

“I don’t want to mess up your plans today.”

“There isn’t anything more important to me today than being with you,” I tell her with hands soaking in dishwater.

This is how Jesus feels about you and me when we are hesitant to ask Him for what we want.

While I prep her favorite meal for dinner so we can be free of work by sundown, I think about how she expresses longings for my cooking when distance separates us. A gift every parent hopes for in her children, a taste for what Mother dishes out. My faith waned in realizing that when she was a picky eater as an adolescent.

“I should have asked you to make cauliflower for me,” she admits an hour after walking through the door from college.

Unaware that moments earlier, I was flipping through the pages of an old journal among a stack of books; reading her first year of life in my handwriting. In 1998, I marveled about the way she ate cauliflower like it was chocolate.

Of course I’d forgotten about that little fact. God knew the detail would matter to me almost two decades later.

This is how Jesus knows you and me better than we know ourselves. He accounts for every detail in the Book of Life.

The moment H and I have been waiting for, for eight long months, came in an email this morning from the diocese of London. We should be on our computers applying for visas but instead we are spending the day with the girl who made us parents nearly nineteen years ago.

The sacrament of presence is more valuable and fulfilling than anything else we can hope for. This is how Jesus loves you and I wholeheartedly.  Rest in the truth of that.

Happy Sabbath Friends!

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