Hold It

The word “hold” was buzzing around my mind this morning.  This weekend was a major sorting of our home, after an equally thorough sorting at momma’s over these last weeks.  Mom had acquired a lot over her 90 years.  I notice that most of us seem to fill up the spaces we have, and sometimes rent storage units for the overflow.  Just writing that sentence threatens to distract me to the topic of clutter, but I will resist that for now.

“Holding” (in my hands) was what I did with hundreds of items lately, determining their meaning, both sentimental and functional.  Would I “hold” onto them, or pass along, or destine them to the garage sale pile or the thrift store bag?  

“Holding on” to what my sister last night described as “the years before we knew there was hurting in the world” was what I desired as items brought memories to the surface and coasted me on on some smooth mental surfboard back and forth across the waves of the decades.  

On “hold” was I would have preferred...not to have to do the process of letting go of momma’s life, or of the preparation toward selling our home and the land that has nestled and inspired us, been a place we’ve welcomed people in and served from, been the touchstone place of much prayer, the strategic planning table of many projects and events, the place where a parent’s heart blended in sometimes patched stitches with cook, laundress, kisser of scraped knees, caller on and disciplinarian, and prayerful intercessor over the almost three decades of time we’ve called this bountiful place “home.”

“Hold” is what I recognize again this morning that God has done...getting a man home from war, the merging of two lives as he met and married a home-town girl, the passing of years that brought three little girls into the world, and all the twists and turns as the three of us grew up, married, and birthed children, careers, events, and good deeds as we had energy and time and vision for.  God is generous, masterful, complete in being faithful and brilliant in His unsurpassed ways of availability and creativity.  

My heart holds a summer bouquet of gratitude this morning for the abundance of it all, for the life I have lived, for the murky and turbulent waters that He has navigated me through and for the hope that has wafted through every day and called me forward to experience what has been just around the corner as His care and provision.    

Photograph from morguefile.com by svklimkin