Love Works

A bad start for Christmas - what’s the world coming to anyway?  

We were sitting in a sacred space for a concert.  Directly in front of us were pre-teen girls - two of them - with Tablets.  The bright screens shone in our eyes – thumbs flicking around, moving game characters.  God.  

I know.  I’m an old man.  These kids live in a different world.  Actually so does their mother.  This looked to be a long concert and both girls were going to be majorly bored.  I resigned myself to an evening of distracted misery.  Perhaps a move across the aisle…  

But the orchestra was done with tuning up.  The choir was marching up the risers.  Now the mom reached along the back of the pew and gave the daughter on her left a gentle pat on the shoulder.  The Tablets flashed off and disappeared and the evening’s surprises began.  

Sharp and bright brasses, booming percussion, fifty perfect human voices took us through two and a half hours of classic, Broadway, traditional Christmas, jazz and locally arranged numbers.  They had us itching to be on our feet at times: singing, applauding.  But time went more slowly for the girls.  Rapt attention alternated with restlessness, squirming, fussing.  

Their mom never lost her cool.  It’s like there was a feeling of mutual trust between that mother and her daughters.  A very quiet whisper in the ear, a little rub.  She’d brush their hair back.  Both of them would lean against her for a while and she’d put her arms around them. Her directives were never hostile or anxious, and their responses were always matter-of-fact and compliant on their own terms.  I couldn’t believe it.  

Not knowing what people’s whole lives are like, it’s still a blessing to see a small picture of love working.  This was Christmas more than anything else.  God is with us, offering to make bearable the boredom-to-brokenness in our lives and the horrors we see in the media every day.  It’s this good stuff that repeatedly wins over my heart, and my hope.