Today’s find: Treasured

Like any true heirloom, the candelabra comes with a story.

Or maybe not a story so much as a memory…a palpable sense of presence, reaching back a full 90 years into one family’s history. That’s what Mom sees today…as she tenderly separates and cleans the components of the candlestick which once stood atop the piano in the parlor at her Aunt Elizabeth’s farmhouse.

More than the sum of its parts: Cleaning the candelabra turned into a chance to reflect on the treasure we have in ‘family’…

Mom grew up in a joyfully bustling crowd – the middle child in a family of eleven siblings. So those visits to the farmhouse tend to stand out in her memory as times when she could (and did) receive some one-on-one loving from her childless aunt.

Loved in a crowd…cherished as an individual: those are two different sensations aren’t they? Little wonder, then, that the crystal candelabra holds a special place in her heart – even some 90 years on from her first encounters with it in the comparative peace-and-quiet of the parlor. There, she knew she was treasured.

It’s this very sort of gift that an admittedly imperfect Dad hopes he has passed on to his own children – a sense that they are loved; that each is loved, individually…particularly. On Father’s Day, he meditates (with humility and wonder) on how becoming a father instantaneously changed him oh-so-many years ago…

…How it made a dusty biblical notion take on flesh and blood: “You shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people…”

…How the covenant is then sealed in a dying-to-self on behalf of a little one in need: “Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time…[and thus] God proves his love for us…”

…And how God has perhaps called him to this task (though he never lived in a farmhouse)…to become a laborer for the harvest.

What wonderful work it turns out to be, fatherhood – a cornucopia of daily blessings, adding up to decades of proof that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

The candelabra reminds me, too, that it’s a story as old as time. This is how God chooses to work in the world – through us. Through each of us. Through all of us.

“Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”

Gallery of grace: In a loving family, the blessings stretch out for decades, through the generations…

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS