Happy Thursday, friends!
Let’s all be kind to each other today…. because you know what? We all carry silent, invisible weights. Even though our days are full of blessings – we also all have pains. Sometimes, a person will drop what they are doing and just freeze, stopped dead in their tracks by a sudden wave of emotion, and the people standing right next to them won’t have a single clue why.
I used to have a friend whose favorite catchphrase was, “That’s so weird,” whenever she encountered a person or emotional reaction or a situation she didn’t quite understand. I loved her dearly, but I always winced inside when she said that phrase. Just because a person’s behavior or feelings are unfamiliar to our own lived experience doesn’t make them “weird.” It usually just means we don’t know the story behind it…we don’t understand. We don’t always know what hurts, what fears, what pains a person is carrying behind their smiles.
A Quiet Moment of Reflection
Take last night, for instance. If you had walked into my kitchen, you would have seen a grown woman standing by the cabinets, holding an empty cardboard tube with tears in her eyes. To a stranger, it would probably look weird, but to me, it was a quiet moment of unexpected reflection.
When my parents passed away, I made the decision to move into their house in Green Forest. Even though I had never lived in this house before, it felt like I had… because in many ways, it is the house I grew up in.
When I was a little girl, Mother and Daddy sat down together and carefully drew a house plan that Daddy then built between Hattieville and Old Hickory, Arkansas. Since that house and this house are basically identical, this home has always felt to me like the house I grew up in.
After Mother passed away—she was my last surviving parent—I found joy in the little daily reminders left behind in her space. After moving in, I definitely worked to make the house feel like mine, but I also loved seeing the things that she had left, that she had used. They were precious connections to her, and I treasured each one of them.
But… she’s been gone for almost four years now—and slowly, inevitably, those daily physical reminders, those physical connections are getting fewer and farther between….and I miss them.
The End of the Supply
Last night, I was getting ready to bake some Sister Schubert cinnamon rolls. I was excited to try them! I turned on the oven and started eagerly reading through the instructions. They said to cover the pan loosely with aluminum foil…
…so I walked over to this really cool, custom dispenser that Mother had built into her kitchen cabinets for wax paper, plastic wrap, and aluminum foil. I reached up, grabbed the edge of the foil, and pulled.
As it unrolled, I pulled up a bit preparing to tear it off… but instead, it fell free. It was the end of the roll.
This was a roll of aluminum foil that my mother had bought, and taken out of the box, and placed on that holder when this was still her house. I had just used the very last of her physical supply.
It stopped me for a moment, and it made me remember. I stood in my kitchen holding that piece of aluminum foil thinking about how much she loved her house, how much she loved to cook, how much she loved to smile and laugh, how much she loved to give to others, and about how much she loved me…and I missed her. Tears came to my eyes, and I stood there in the quiet kitchen holding that empty roll for a minute, just treasuring the moment—the physical connection to the mother who birthed me, who loved me, and who worked so hard to build a happy life for me…
The Things That Never Run Out
…and that’s what’s really important. The love she and Daddy poured into me, the things they taught me, the deep joy they wanted for my life, the prayers they prayed for me, the examples they set for me. Those things never go away. They never run out.
So…while it could have definitely looked weird for me to tear up over a box of aluminum foil last night—it really wasn’t. It was just a daughter loving her mother and savoring the memories of the times they shared together.
You really never know what’s going on in a person’s mind and what fears and hurts and pain they carry… because we all have them. So let’s all just be kind today. We are all in this together. ❤️❤️❤️
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” — Ephesians 4:32