ParadiSE

Let me tell you about this little girl.  She is loved, thoroughly and unconditionally.  Her Mommy is kind and teaches her good manners and how to think of other people's feelings, how to work and play and read and do things with excellence.  Her Daddy -- oh, her Daddy!  He gets on the floor to play with tinker toys, he lets her fly like an airplane on his upraised foot.  He pretends to eat the mud pies she makes on the front porch.  He snuggles her and tells her how beautiful she is and that Jesus loves her and has an amazing plan for her life.  He is silly and tender and a foreshadowing of what she will eventually discover of her Heavenly Father.  He leaves seminary every afternoon to pick her up from preschool for lunch -- the only father to do so.  Their lunch menu every day is peanut butter and jelly or honey sandwiches, hot chocolate and a piece of cheese.

This little SE is blissfully ignorant of evil or hardship.  She doesn't yet know that her family is poor, that her mother cries over bills, that the budget is somehow miraculously met every month by groceries that appear on the front porch, by the gas meter apparently running *backwards* during the biggest snowstorm the county has ever seen, by an anonymous payment to the phone company on our behalf.  She has not yet been teased by classmates over her glasses or the brand of her clothes.  She doesn't even know what temptation is at this point, or that there's reason to feel guilt or fear.

No, all this little girl knows is that SHE IS LOVED, fully and perfectly.  SE in paradiSE.

This picture is my Bible bookmark, and every time the book falls open to it or I hit my knees to pray, I first spend time looking at it, a reminder of who God made me to be and the kind of existence I will soon experience in His presence.   Simply being -- no agenda, no needs, no concerns, no fears, no guilt, no struggles! -- drowning in the reckless, raging fury of His Love.

This is the greatest gift my Mom and Dad ever gave me, the absolute certainty of how much Jesus loves me and who I am in Him, despite the false names the world and the devil try to pin on me.  And this is my greatest goal in mothering my own precious girls:  to so reflect God's love for them that they have a picture in their own Bibles many years from now, of little girls at rest and in peace, surrounded by the love of their Mommy and Jesus.