Call Your Daughter Home

by Deb Spera

There’s such a difference in the quiet when everyone is gone. Sound travels well in this old place, even from up here, the clock in the entry hall, distant shouts of men across the property, the creaking and settling of the floorboards beneath my feet. This place has an identity all its own. It’s a rare moment when I get to stop and listen to its voice.

What good does it do, except drain possibility from the day?

Experience in life can only be judged by the obstacles one has to overcome to get it.”

When I am finished here in this place, on this earth, will I miss them? Is missing something that hasn’t yet happened as potent as missing that which already has?

Children can’t see that for every day they are on this earth, they are changing. I suppose God designed it that way to spare us the fear of what change means.

I have neighbors near enough for me to hear them and them to hear me. I am all at once reminded of other lives beyond the one I have lived.

We’re clay in God’s hands now, standing in unison, like a wave looking for shore. We know the power of God.

Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.

“Lord, as we place the seed of faith inside our spirit today, we ask that You would increase its power. Increase our faith so that tiny little mustard seed that You allow to grow in our lives will remind us that You will forever be our protector and our provider. Amen.”