God-moments in June

“I wish you many God-moments in the year to come” says one of my birthday cards. I’ve not only read the God-moment phrase in a card, but I’ve also have seen it on social media and have heard it in real-life conversation. I have said and written the phrase myself.  What is a God-moment?

Is it that feeling of awe you get when you view something majestic or breathtakingly beautiful in nature, and you realize that only God could have made such a wonder, so you take a moment to thank and praise Him?

Is a God-moment when you have prayed in desperation for something and suddenly the answer to your prayer comes, and the timing as well as the form in which it appears is so unexpected that you just know it had to be God?

Or is it when a truth strikes you in a brand-new way or a confirmation of something you’ve been thinking all along gets underscored and you almost want to yell the “Yes!” that surges in your spirit?

I suppose there’s a myriad of ways that God-moments come to us all. Here, in a series of pics and text, are some of mine that I’ve had in the month of June: 

I seem to have God-moments easily when I’m with my grandbaby, Seth. He’s two months old now, and getting only cuter and more charming with age. It seemed to take so long until he finally came to our house for the first time, but since then, he’s been making a regular habit of it. We love it! The other night Rolin and Joy went out for supper to celebrate their third anniversary and Ken & I got to babysit Seth for the first time. When I watched Ken interacting with his grandson and heard them during a chuckle exchange, the delight I experienced in both of these loved ones was, I believe, a God-moment.

I also got to be at a baby shower for Joy (or was it for Seth? I never know for sure whether a baby shower is actually for the mom or for the baby. Probably it’s both.) in June. It was pretty special to attend my first baby shower for a grandchild that day. If you need an interesting activity idea for a baby shower you’re planning, here’s an idea. Have each shower attendee bring a baby picture of herself to be displayed at the party. Have everyone guess who is who by looking at the pictures on display. It’s harder – and more intriguing – than you might think. Here’s a pose of the shower baby, his mom, and his two grandmas:

                                                                                     (Photo Cred: Jasmine Martin)

                                                                                          

I had a birthday in June. Birthdays always are an opportunity for me to reflect on the goodness of God in His granting me another year of life. In that reflection of His blessings on me, I always end up feeling rich. Here’s a sample of my journal entries regarding the richness I recorded this June:

“White feathery dandelion balls in sunset light”

“The cedar waxwing and thrush and some kind of yellow warbler on the Elmira rail trail walk”

“Garden tilled! Garden planted! Whole thing!”

“So many sweet and funny and nice bday messages”

“Phil and Rosemary’s twins were born on my (and Anni’s) birthday!”

“My “Glory Soak” moments, as dubbed by Ann Voskamp”

“Us Kenites ladies chatting in Joy’s kitchen after brunch”

“How Ken takes his grandpa role so seriously and passionately”

“Gorgeous and tasty food at the Martin Ladies’ Bday celeb”

In the month of June, I reread the children’s story, “The Secret Garden” (Frances Hodgson Burnett) by listening to an audio recording of it. A book I loved when I was a child still held intrigue for me these many years later. I understood a deeper layer of Mary Lennox’s character growth and Colin Craven’s healing, as well as more of the motherly wisdom of Dickon and Martha’s mother Mrs. Susan Sowerby this time through.

I had a God-moment one day as I worked in the kitchen, listening to a chapter in The Secret Garden. It happened when I heard the part about the robin and his mate and their Eggs. The paragraph began by describing the nervous watchfulness of the parent birds as they observed Mary and her friends in the secret garden sharing their space. They were wary because they weren’t sure that the other creatures realized like they did “the wonderfulness of what was happening to them—the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end—if there had been even one who did not feel it and act accordingly there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air.”

I heard that piece of the book and immediately connected it to a topic foremost and heavy on my mind – the abuse tragedy in Haiti. I thought of the “immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity” of The Young Men in Haiti, and it moved me at a place very deep within. I thought of the tender and terrible Maker of the Boys, and felt at once both comfort and great pain. No wonder the news of so many hurt Eggs has whirled many whole worlds round and seemingly crashed them through space and brought them to a desperate, despairing end; why there has been no happiness even in our golden summertime air.

Since we’ve been going to Oasis, our new church in downtown Kitchener, we have begun developing a friendship with a woman (I’ll call her Debbie) whom we’d been merely acquainted with years ago. She lives just across the street from the building in which we “Oasisans” meet for evening church meetings and functions other than our Sunday morning services.

Debbie has been an orphan for more than six decades of her 70 years. Not having any family of her own to speak of, she loves getting in on our family life. During one of her almost-weekly visits to our home, I suggested we take a walk on the St. Jacobs Millrace Trail. She was willing to give it a try, so we spent a couple of hours meandering up the trail its full length from village to dam, and back down. It was a perfect June day, and wildlife abounded on the trail and in the water on one side of the trail and in the woods on the other side.

When I think back on that time and recall the peacefulness of our surroundings, the intrigue of a pair of muskrats swimming to their den with their mouths chuck full of long grasses, how Debbie delighted in everything from the twisted bark of the cedar tree trunks to the little baby mink bounding down the path ahead of us, I realize that we shared a long God-moment that afternoon.

What’s your definition of a God-moment? Want to tell me about one you’ve had lately?

This Post's Quotable:

A conversation among some ladies from our church on a Sunday night went something like this:

“Did you catch the pastor’s pun in his message this morning? When he was talking about positive thinking alone being an inadequate motivation for a responsible surgeon wanting to start a practice, he said that it just wouldn’t cut it.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I didn’t either. It would take a pun-lover to notice.”
“Yeah, you had to be sharp for that one.” 

This Post's Childhood Memory:

When we had a few Sunday School lessons from the book of Amos recently, and we studied the vision of the plumb line, I thought about some of my dad’s carpenter tools. I remember him using a plumb line and a chalk line on various occasions, such as when he was laying block for building our barn. The plumb line was a long, thin string with a metal weight tied (or attached in some way) to one end. Dad would hold it up to a block wall to see if the wall was straight vertically, leaning neither forward or backward, nor shifting to one side or the other. The chalk line was a thin string wound up into a little diamond-shaped metal case that could be held in one hand. Dad would pull the string out of one end of the case by a metal loop at its end and hook it on to a nail (or get someone to hold it at the proper place) at one edge of the concrete slab or sheet of wood he wished to mark. He’d then walk the distance to the other end, unreeling the line as he went. When he was ready to mark the line, he made the string fairly taut, but not so tight that he couldn’t raise it just a bit and let it go, allowing it to snap back down. The string had been cased in red chalk dust which adhered to the surface as it was snapped, making a straight red line to be used as an alignment gauge. After the line was marked, someone would unhook the string at the nail end while Dad would stand at the other end and pull out a little metal handle from the side of the chalk line case to use as a crank to reel the line back in. I thought the whole procedure was very fascinating.