“Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship our spirit finds
Is like to that above.” John Fawcett
One of my favorite moments of the past year is one only I will remember.
I swept my toddling granddaughter up into my arms at a family gathering. I talked fast, to say my heart before she could wiggle down and waddle back to Mommy.
“I held you when you were tiny,” I began.
She smiled and stayed still. She listened. I sensed she understood that I was telling her the beginning of our story–the moment she and I first met and the words I told her then.
“Jesus loves you. Grandma loves you. You have a wonderful mommy and daddy.”
I added that we’d been waiting for her.
It’s a tiny moment I may, if God wills, repeat to her over the years. Something I hope and pray will tie a new string between our hearts each time I say it. A string that is a piece of a cord of love.
This Mothers Day was a time of separation–a time that stretched our cords of connection. Not in the certainty of our connections. Just in the yearning for each other’s presence once more.
We never would have imagined we would suffer this separation.
“Before our Father’s throne,
We pour our ardent prayers;
Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one–
Our comforts and our cares.“
Our fears as one is an idea that is more universal in light of the coronavirus crisis. In our separation, we have opportunity to bear one another’s burdens. To strengthen the cords of connection in a unity of distance. We all miss each other.
“When we asunder part
It gives us inward pain;
But we shall still be joined in heart,
And hope to meet again.“
It’s a Mothers’ Day we will all remember. We hope next year’s will be different, more like others in the past, yet its own. A day of meeting and connecting.
Each meeting makes a thread to strengthen our cords of connection. Every story told, every memory, every moment of interaction build bonds between us.
There can be a strengthened bond in the anticipation of those moments–our desire laying its own fibers of connection.
God bless the ties that bind our hearts in His love.