Friday, December 6, 2013

My Cup of Joy Overflows

It's been nearly six months since I bid adieu to the younger of my two sons as he set off to Colorado for the first job in his area of study.  The start of his career path in finance was an aside, really, to the presence of majestic mountains and beautiful boulders.  Boulders may not hold the same beauty as mountains, but they have little crags and crevices nimble fingers and toes fit neatly into for a rare breed of spider people who desire to scale them.  The desire to climb was birthed in this child, always a child in my heart, but to others, a man of 23 years.  

Psalm 37:4

New International Version (NIV)

 Take delight in the Lord,
    and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Sometimes, probably too many times, believers perceive the Lord as a gimme-god and use this scripture in error, thinking He'll make a way for us to have all our material wants.  It's a long walk, for the hard-headed anyway, reference to self, to realize God's children must trust Him to initiate and place those desires!  Do we really think this life is all about us, our wants, our needs?  
My wants?  Oh, how I want this young'un to live closer to home!  
Author and Bishop T.D. Jakes says, "When you have children, hold them, love them, care for them, empower them.  But understand that you are only temporary stewards.  They belong to God."
The same God Who places desires in our hearts. 
The strands of my son's DNA hold bits and pieces of those before him, his mother's love of climbing trees, his father's adventuresome spirit in piloting small aircraft, and his maternal and paternal grandfathers' risk-taking in testing and tuning race cars and experimental aircraft respectively.  Deoxyribonucleic acid, one of few terms I recall from science classes--all God's wonderful idea.  
I'm thoroughly convinced the love of climbing was installed in him prior to his birth.  My first child became serious, getting in place to be born, waited nicely.  I thought that was how it was until I birthed a second who seemed to clamber his way out of my womb.  The doctor who caught the child who practically delivered himself held him up with one hand, and with the other, unwrapped the crisscrossed umbilical cord from under the arms, through the legs, a certain predictor of the climbing ropes he eventually asked for one Christmas.    
He couldn't wait to get out and start climbing!  Reviewing pictures from literally infancy, the child was climbing before he walked, scaling love seats, out of his crib.  As flitter flat as the deep southeast is, he'd find things to climb wherever he went, and yes, I saw that picture online where he scaled a building at the university he attended, no ladder needed.
He had to go to the mountains and boulders because they would not come to him.  His brother once told me how mesmerized baby boy was before a boulder, entranced, in deep study, before commencing a climb.  It was if no one else was on the planet, just him and that boulder.  
Do I believe when the Lord spoke boulders into being he had my little blue-eyed, curly-mopped top guy in mind?  
I do.  
This boulder, that boulder, those mountain ranges, they weren't just meant to be looked at and photographed, ya know!  They cry out through the ages for someone, anyone, to conquer them.  
While they were calling, and before he could get to them, baby boy rehearsed on artificial rock walls and made the occasional trip to visit a real one when he could find time between finance classes and a part-time job in banking and another part-time job minding the rock wall at the university's rec center. 
A desire in my heart is that in time he'll fall in love with the mountains on the east coast, a day's drive, as opposed to two, from his mother's abode.  
In the meantime, he is home this weekend for a visit to his beautiful girlfriend, also a climber, to see her ascend the steps of the stage at the local university to receive the diploma she earned in her studies at the nursing school.  The cool part is his dad and I get to see him, too!
We have lived long enough to witness both our sons graduate from high school and college with honors; well, baby boy did make the dean's list a couple of times.  We have attended the wedding of our elder son, to a lovely young woman whose college graduation we also attended, incidentally the day he proposed to her.  We have a daughter-in-love, and now our daughter-in-heart will join the others, college diploma in hand, all of life ahead.  
No surprise, baby boy earned his a year early.  I tease him sometimes about being a high school dropout.  He left high school after the 11th grade to attend college full-time.
I think he was in a hurry to get to those mountains he had to climb.  
 baby boy


The beautiful graduate to be who is soon moving to Colorado

 The reason mothers pray while their heart is saying, "You go, kid!" 

Climb those mountains, live your lives, and know you can never go far enough away to escape your mother's love and prayers.

Thank you, God, for spirited, adventuresome, accomplished, and occasionally knuckle-headed children.  I am a blessed woman!