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"A MORNING BENEDICTION"
I had fallen asleep late the night before, body worn out with unpacking, heart sorrow-sore from too many losses. In sleep's unconscious availability, my mind replayed one of those exquisite moments in time you can never forget, if you can never exactly recall it either. I woke with a bright memory of that blessed dream, a vivid sense of benediction in my soul.
The dream revived a July morning more than four decades past in the quiet of an Appalachian mountain hollow, when we four oldest siblings rose early to do our berry picking before the day's first heat. There was light laughter and a brilliant sky with billowed clouds along its edge, a soft breeze that moved along our skins and morning glories on a fence, junebugs buzzing and flashing like emeralds when they were disturbed and happiness as the screen door rattled shut behind us. The morning's freedom to enjoy nature, even with the hard work, was a lovely gift to us, a break from the usual tobacco field drudgery of handpicking caterpillars off leaves that left our hands itching for hours. We knew that by noon we'd be selling the berries door-to-door in Bristol or Johnson City. The afternoon held the exhilarating promise of more moments of unsupervised freedom and chances to talk with friendly strangers who might offer exotic city treats like iced lemonade or ginger cookies to the hillbilly urchins peddling country produce.
Beyond the raspberry and blackberry canes we'd planted, we found a hidden hillside stand of wild strawberries, a welcome, unsought grace for our always hungry bellies. We ate them all, every tiny pickable berry, their tart red juices smearing across our sun-browned cheeks and chins. Such a breakfast any queen or king might have envied; but knowing their extra worth when sold in town, we never told a soul we'd found the berries. When I woke, the taste of wild strawberries was in my mouth. Nothing else in all the world is like that taste.
I left the apartment with our little dog Toto ten minutes later for his morning walk in the solitude and quietness of an early Sunday morning when it happened: the light and colors of that other morning seemed to overlay this one. An almost anxious awe slowed my steps.
The sub-tropic September morning sky was the same shade of iced blue as the other from that distant summer day. Clouds that might have been transported here from that other morning were piled high on the horizon. A breeze full of summer scents whispered around me, and something buzzed in the fields beyond the parking lot. The laughter of the grandchildren who were visiting my neighbor echoed down the corridors of the building. I knew that only God knows of that other morning from my youth, and He was giving something from it back to me with the soft remembrance of childhood's laughter and the taste of wild, forbidden berries.
The Lord I know and serve wants to place His benediction inside your mind, too. Email me to ask me what I mean.
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(You may publish any articles from this site as they appear with the following byline intact. Please advise me by e-mail if you decide to use one of these articles
on your site or in an e-zine.)
After 30+ years in public ministry as missionary, pastoral counselor, homeschooling mentor, writer and editor, Georgia Ana Larson now focuses
on an internet-based ministry and business founded in grace and expressed
through mentoring others who have a similar desire to work from home,
nurture a family, build a business and stay faithful to a deep interior Call
to have a life of devotion expressed in service, no matter what context.
You can read more of her articles at her home site: www.aBrighterCandle.com
Copyright © 2006 Georgia Ana Larson, All rights reserved
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