Faces Attentive To A Skyward Joy
We’ve heard some precious stories about life with this precious threesome from our current hosts, M and Mel, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The children are M’s siblings … and the photo is over fifty years old.
M grew up with his sister and brothers in an apartment above their father’s funeral home in northern Minnesota. The details in that sentence are about as arresting to me as the details in the sibling photo above: red coat, red liner, red boots; a stuffed animal stuffed in a pocket; warm hats and cowboy thumbs; faces attentive to a skyward joy.
It’s the sort of photo moment that happens every millisecond on this year-long journey … and I’ve struggled over the last few hours about whether to be grateful for the eight months of moments we’ve had so far, or to mourn the fact that “only” three months or so of moments remain.
My wife and close friends will recognize — and, likely, chide me for — this tendency to focus on what’s lost or what has passed or what might soon end. I do have a soft spot for soft, sad places. These are Echoes, too.
Yet, I take the lesson that’s perhaps in this sibling photo that happened to intersect with my journey today. Like M’s sister and brothers, I turn my face Heavenward … attentive to right now’s skyward joy.
This. Is. Great. Thanks for writing it. Those places of doing BOTH—gratitude and mourning, joy and sorrow, now but not yet, are the places where we so deeply need the assurance and love and REST of Christ. The echoes are strong there, seems to me.