Two Short Stories

Story number One

Our little Ezra is learning to hang up the laundry. When I say learning, I mean trying. The other day Gibbie and I were hanging laundry. After flinging maybe a dozen pieces of wet clothes straight behind him, Ever found a small, red, outgrown baby sock. As long as your thumb. With both hands, he put that wee sock on the lowest dowel, right in the corner. If fell off. He picked it up, in two hands, and oh so carefully placed it back up on the rod. Down it dropped. Again and again. Patiently, carefully, deliberately, he hung that sock up again and again. It never stayed. He just didn't know how to balance it, or stretch it out enough to make it work, but he set it up there again and again.

I thought, I am like that baby. Right now in life-- trying and trying to do something I simply can't yet do.




Story number Two

So I was at the house of this woman whom I respect and like and admire. Being at her house and being around her herself is like drinking a glass of water. Sitting on a rock, having a drink; refreshing.

We were talking and I, who can't stop talking, who am compelled to keep a stream of words going, uninterrupted, to my own peril, didn't have much to say. Her house was peaceful. Not like she'd just cleaned, but like it just was. There was soup on the stove, and it smelled good. It was cold outside and we'd come on the bus, all bundled up against the cold. The kids were busy with a box of plastic animals on the floor.

I said how I always read read read, always all the time, how I fill up all my moments with out stopping, and don't take time to stop, to listen, to be with God.

She interrupted me--"Are you afraid of something?
I never stopped and I realized I was afraid to be still... and it was like He said--What if I just want to hold you?"

We stayed all morning.