Life Between the Rocking Chairs

 The older I get the more I discover that everything I do and everything I am is both given to me and grown in me by God and His beautiful plan of transformation. We spend years amassing ‘things’…years building our image…behavior that bolsters our status, while God spends years silently breaking our desire for those things. As my sister Benay said at lunch one day, ‘That God is a sneaky one!’ This morning as I was rocking on my glider spending time in prayer, I got an overwhelming sensation of gratitude for being born into a Christian family. Just like that I was back in the nursery as a teenager rocking babies at First ARP Church in Lancaster, SC.

I have always loved rocking and the peace it brings me no matter what my circumstances present. As I rocked this morning, memories flooded my heart with times that I remember rocking. As a 7-year-old I remember rocking in my grandmother’s hot metal glider on her side porch. I was eating an apple and a hornet stung my lip, and Holdie immediately put ice on the swelling and comforted me. I remember as a teenager I went to our church camp and worked as a waitress for half the summer. Many days were spent in the rocking chairs on the porch of the grand hotel overlooking the mountains dreaming about my future. Many years later as a young mother I spent hours (and years) rocking my babies through infancy, tummy aches, fevers and joy…lots of joy. As an adult, I remember days of gliding on the front porch with my sisters, my dad and my mom dissecting whatever was happening in our family. Eight years of rocking while my daughter was walking through her drug addiction. I rocked grand-babies at their birth as well as in Beth’s room at Hospice right before her death. Almost a decade ago, my precious father-in-law lived with us during his last year of Alzheimer’s. Each night we would sit on my glider sharing stories of his childhood (since that was all he could remember), as we awaited Bruce’s return from work.

Then it occurred to me of how much life has been lived between the rocking chairs. More times than not rocking has been a source of great joy but occasionally it involved such pain and despair. Many days of rocking were accompanied with soaked cheeks and swollen eyes. And that is when the reality struck me this morning…as I was rocking during all of those heartbreaking times, God was rocking me. Not once did He leave me…Not once was I not comforted…Not once did I have to face the next day alone.

There is great joy and comfort in accessing our lives behind us when facing our lives before us. I don’t have to fear what circumstances I will face in the future because I will never rock alone.