Love Touch

The lights were all turned out tonight except the dim glow from the hall, when I tiptoed into peek on sleeping Shalom for the last time.

And there he was.

I could see his hunched over shape silhouetted by the light. There, in the night’s quiet, crouched Caleb, my boy-man, bare-chested and ready for bed, kneeling close over the Moses basket, and sleeping Shalom. I stepped back into the hushed shadows, watching.

Sweeping down from the ceiling over the Moses basket is a swirl of white netting, shrouding our babe from pesky flies. And there stooped our lanky boy, the white sheer falling around him, his eyes on Shalom.

He reaches out his hand. He touches hers. In her slumber, she wraps her fingers around one of his. Then I see what he thinks no one sees: he strokes her clinging fingers. His eyes never leaving her face. Mine never leaving his.

This boy-man taken with inventions and dogs and junk piles and bush trails and engines sat here. In Shalom’s crowning canopy of white.

This boy-man who yesterday climbed a roof, rough-housed in the pool, snuck up on unsuspecting targets with precisely-aimed water balloons, and stained up a pair of pants on the soccer field, now kneels wordlessly to gaze upon the beauty of a sleeping babe. His little sister.

There, from the darkness, I see Caleb shed another layer of boyhood. And grow more into his man skin. For a lingering moment, he isn't a rambunctious, testosterone-pumped, reckless boy. He is a young man, who stepped through the falling curtain, bent down low…and touched a babe. To say that he loves her.

And I have the privilege of witnessing. Witnessing what it means to be family.

To reach out across the chasm of age and interests and gender…and say, in the still, “I, who am so very different from you,---I love you----you, who are so very different from me."

That is what ties us to one another. Love. It’s all.

Soon Caleb stands, steps back out of the sheer canopy, leaving baby Shalom draped in dreams.

He sees me there. And speaks, “Her hand is so soft. Mine feels so old and wrinkly when I touch hers..... But it was nice.”

He smiles awkwardly, then steps into a darkened bedroom to find pillow and sleep.

Yes, it is nice, I think. For it transforms us, and the world, when we brush back the curtains that separate us, reach out, and touch someone with the skin of our soul.



Lord, in the end, love is all there is. What curtain can I sweep back today, to reach past that which distances, and touch someone, even in this family? I want to grow into skin like Yours.

Posted from the 2005 archives
Photo: Touching niece Ana, a family walk