When the Moon Doesn't Shine

"Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love endures forever." Psalm 136:1

Usually the moon shines bright on clear May nights in eastern Pennsylvania. But tonight the moon is missing. All is dark. I notice brown circles under the lamp in the hall when mother welcomes our 2:00 a.m. arrival from Illinois. I also notice brown circles under her eyes. Tired skin under gentle folds.

But here she stands, my mother for forty years. I sense an accumulation of nights waiting up for home-coming children, as though the years have cast shadows from the lamp onto her face. I see the years in the black and blue veins that have just this week felt the heart specialist's probe. I hear the years - like the ocean ringing in seashell - in the doctor's diagnosis: "Enlarged Heart . . . . slow the pace . . . ." I stare into uncertainty. Tomorrow has been an assumed promise - a grand procession of weddings, births, celebrations. Time has been an event, not a sequence.

As I look at Mother, I sense that someone has wound the clock. years have become increments. History has a beginning and an end. I shiver in the early morning chill. But then Mother's arms wrap me in warmth, and I am home. A forty-year-old child reassured by her mother's touch. There is no time to touch.

I hear the tea kettle whistling. Mother's chocolate chip cookies on Grandma Hollinger's ironstone plate pull me back into timelessness. Our laughter drowns out the clock. There is no time in laughter. Mother laughs the hardest of all. Dark circles. Tired circles of joy. Her children are home.

For a moment I forget bruised veins and ticking clocks. I am held together by things that do not change - a mother's early morning welcome, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and ironstone plate and laughter. I am held together by a God who does no change. I know the God of time who is yet above time. I see tonight in my mother's face the strange paradox of time and timelessness. A rare glimpse of the divine.

By Ruth Senter, taken from "Women's Devotional Bible 2"