In Celebration of Sisters

Separated by fifty miles of white drifts and endless farm fields of blowing snow, we warmed ourselves with honest conversation and unspoken sympathies for the long snow day that loomed ahead.

Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “It’s just that loving him looked so messy.”

“OOEY!” Maggie hollered as I rolled the dirty Pamper into a tight ball to smother the arresting aroma tickling my nose.

“On most days, I’ve got plenty of messes right beneath my own roof,” my sister admitted.
Her rambunctious four–year–old screeched in the background.
Her teenage daughter’s voice rose above the squeal.
“I keep telling myself that I’ll step into other people’s messes in a different season of life…”

“Like when your hands aren’t covered with Elmer’s glue and melted popsicles?” I teased.

My sister chuckled, and I raced to the kitchen to investigate a suspicious clunk.

Fresh–diapered Maggie was balancing on the step stool and reaching for the stove–top skillet of chicken Dijon that I’d abandoned for diaper duty twenty–minutes ago.

“No, honey,” I murmured as I lifted my baby from the stool and pushed her through the doorway toward the pile of board books scattered haphazardly across the floor in the adjacent room.

“But what if God wants my someday to be right now?” my sister continued.

 I heard my young nephew crooning a Matt Redman song in the background. “Oh, no! You never let go. Through the calm and through the storm…” I could picture him spinning about the room with his signature rock and roll wiggle.

“Do you know what I mean?” my sister pleaded.

“Yeah,” I replied as I absorbed the site of my kitchen counter buried beneath splats of white flour and globs of sugar cookie dough.

My ambitious morning chefs were nowhere in sight, but their snowmen cut–outs grinned at me from a cookie sheet hovering on the ledge of the dish-stacked sink.

They’ve found only clean spot in the room, I marveled as I grabbed the abandoned carton of eggs and returned it to the refrigerator.  

I moved the pan from its precarious position, kicked a stray cookie cutter across the floor, and slid Frosty and his friends into the oven.

“I always pictured love like more of a Hallmark card,” I amitted, once again cradling the phone with my neck and dropping to all fours.

For the third time of the morning, I applied dishrag to kitchen floor.
I plucked a piece of raw cookie dough from a puddle of apple juice and tried to imagine life without sticky drips and spills.

“That’s not exactly how God paints it in his Word, huh?” my sister wisely countered.

I wrung gray water from my sopping dish rag and envisioned shepherds wading through animal droppings to greet their infant Savior.

I imagined pristinely clad wise men falling prostrate on a humble dirt floor before a scantily clad baby. And I spied the King of Kings dangling from a jagged wooden cross.

“Not exactly,” I agreed.

My sister’s response was drowned out by the army of tattle–tale–ers that suddenly stormed the kitchen.

Joshua trounced across the slippery floor in a defiant stomp while his sister followed close behind with a headless Barbie doll.

“I’m gonna have to go now,” I warned my sister as I walked my resident Barbie assassin to the time–out chair and took my tearful seven-year-old by the hand.

We promised to pray for one another and wished each other a happy snow day. 

“Love ya,” my sister said as we ended our call.

I dug through the motley assortment of tools stashed on top of the refrigerator.

Hannah’s wails of frustration quieted as I re–attached Barbie’s head with a blue–handled pliers.

“Love you, too,” I echoed from the middle of my mess. “Love you, too.”

 The Overflow: 

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.


 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.


 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 
                                                                                                                           -I Corinthians 13
                                                                                                    modified from the archives, 2011

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