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God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4:16b)
Creation speaks; sometimes, we hear.
Occasionally, we understand, but words are insufficient, their poverty
apparent.
She was nine, maybe 10, simultaneously
dismounting her bike while holding it against the gravity of the steep slope where
Belmont meets Maple Avenue. Pony tail
trailing behind her, she dug her feet into the sidewalk and stopped just before
her front tire tumbled over the curb and into the street as cars braked for a
red light.
“Be careful little one,” I said, as
she stopped fewer than 10 feet from my bumper. She couldn’t have heard me. The
car windows were closed, but something within sprang open as an awareness
rushed in to fill every corner of my consciousness.
I saw her face, the look in her eyes,
and in an instant felt how wondrously precious life is, her life, every life,
and what an unspeakable tragedy it would be for that life to be lost and the
world denied whatever beauty will come to be through the precious, irreplaceable
years she has on this good and green earth.
But these are mere words, and there
were no words in that moment, only awareness, an intuition of life as a holy
and unimaginable gift—and love, love for the life of that girl, love for my own
life and all the loves within it that so love me in spite of myself, love for
the inexplicable Source of the loving awareness that evaporated every other
thought and feeling for one precious second.
Whatever we know of God in this life,
whatever our senses can perceive and hold, savor and share (in some utterly inadequate
way) was present in that awareness, as love banished everything from my soul
but its own wondrous reality, freeing my heart to see as love sees and to know as
God knows.
David L. Miller
