Today's Walk With Him Wednesday is a repost from the 2005 archives... and speaks into my own not-yet-written stories this week. I ask your grace in the post below this one...
The lights were all turned out tonight except the dim glow from the hall, when I tiptoe into peek on sleeping Shalom.
And there he is.
I can see his hunched over shape silhouetted by the light. There, in night’s quiet crouches Caleb, my boy-man, bare-chested and ready for bed, kneeling close over the Moses basket and sleeping Shalom.
I step back into shadows.
Sweeping down from the ceiling over the Moses basket is a swirl of white netting, shrouding our babe from pesky flies. And there stoops 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 leave her face.
Mine never leave 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. He is one who now kneels wordlessly to gaze upon the beauty of a babe, little sister sleeping.
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 steps through the falling curtain, bends low…and touches skin. To say in his way that he loves her.
I witness.
Witness 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. That is all.
Caleb stands, steps back out of the sheer canopy. He leaves baby Shalom draped in dreams.
He sees me and I see him awkward, only for a fleeting moment and then gone. He covers the embarrassment with words and he speaks quiet.
“Her hand is so soft.... And mine feels so... old and wrinkly when I touch hers. But still... it was nice.”
He smiles shy, then steps into a darkened bedroom to find pillow and sleep.
Yes, this is nice, for this is all, and for us who are so different from each other.
For this is what transforms us, and all the wild world:
When we brush back the curtains that divide us and touch a life with the skin of our soul.
I turn out the last light and I know the names and the faces that need to feel love skin.
Lord, love is all there is.
Tear down the curtains,
span the aching distances
that I might touch someone
with skin like yours.
Every Wednesday, we Walk with Him, posting a spiritual practice that draws us nearer to His heart.
To read the entire series of spiritual practices
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