Awakening Grace

How could I have been dead all day and not really know it?

There had been the plugged toilet, there was no getting around knowing that. We all knew that needed attention, a toilet in a house of eight always requiring immediate resurrection.

After that, there had been the mad dash to music lessons. Lots of frantic movement, sure, and yes, flailing — but really? I’d been numbed right through, just going through the motions.

And after that, there was the burnt soup, just because I failed to stir. Is that why we die in a thousand ways every day? Because we fail to stand near the heat and stir ourselves awake?

It wasn’t till our littlest, Shalom, pulled those two kitties into her arms that I knew something in me had been the walking dead all day, something in me opened wide. The way those bundles of fur purr deep into the crook of her arm, so quiet. She turns to them and laughs, so full of life, and something stirs in me, so loud.

Maybe it’s the way her tendrils fell that made me see it — that I had fallen asleep all day to the glory, and everywhere. That I had missed my life because I had missed the graces, and I didn’t want to live like this, and isn’t that what Robert Louis Stevenson had written?

“The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.”^a

The toilet fail, the music fumbling, the soup founder — a woman can forget in a thousand ways.

Our youngest, she says it tickles, the way his tail flicks her nose. She says it and her eyes, they laugh with all this light.

She tilts her head so the kitten is in the crook of her neck, tail waving happy — and the way she half smiles, it upholds everything. And this purring. It’s all so perfectly loud.

She’s tickling me awake. A heart can murmur gratitude with its every wide-awake beat.

I have known it, and I know it again, the love crawling all up and over her: intentionally look for ways to give thanks, purpose to give thanks, dare yourself to give thanks anyways — and it’s the setting of an alarm and you could wake up to nothing less than your life.

Set out a gratitude list and there it goes again: an alarm set off by the startling grace of God. Giving thanks, this is an awakening — the breath of God upon the face, close and warm.

When we fill the kitty dish, you can hear it, how they drink. Our girl lies right on her tummy so she can listen.

“Hear them, Mama?” Her eyes dance indigo sky, all uncontained, all alive.

This is what we are doing — she and I smiling over spilled milk anyways.

She and I waking up … this lapping up of life.

Father, Awaker of the dead, awaken me again today. Tendrils of Your grace will fall today — cause me not to forget to give thanks so I don’t fall asleep to my life. To the whole earth spilling over with Your glory.