Sometimes gratitude bursts upon you like a geyser in the spring floods. You’re ho-humming your way through the dishes one evening, scrubbing pots and pans and thinking about the year that has been, when suddenly it all shifts into focus at the kitchen window.

The Narnian lamppost in the yard, and the two (soon to be three) rosy children who spent hours playing beneath it in the fresh snow, and the chicken dinner from your own backyard, and the husband stoking the fire the basement.

You think about the struggle and the wrestling that was, and realize how free your soapy hands now are, and how songs rise up out of dirty dishes and restless nights, and how strength has come dancing to you like hinds feet from high places. And from this vantage crest of year’s end, you look down, and, like so many timeless moments before, the psalmist takes the words right out of your mouth:

“Truly, the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places for me.”

And you feel the safety and freedom of these love lines traced across your land, enclosing you in their embrace, all the while beckoning you to new heights in the center of it all.

Now even the dishwater seems to swish for joy, and the snowflakes fall like poems beyond the glass. There is nothing to do but smile wide and thank the Father of lights and keep on your grateful scrubbing.

~lg