Anticipation

Every time I awoke during the night, I prayed for my mom and my daughter Mhairi, knowing they were somewhere 35,000 miles above the earth headed this way.

I just checked Heathrow Arrivals and they are just about to land there. The prayers continue, as I think about the ordeal ahead getting an 89-year-old exhausted Gramma from Terminal 3 to Terminal 5. And as I think of her loving granddaughter fighting her corner, finding a wheelchair and its requisite pusher, getting her to the next point of departure, buying her a nice coffee, rubbing her arm lovingly. Praise God for such an amazing daughter / granddaughter. I know I do.

So my anticipation mounts as I continue to work in the kitchen, preparing food for tonight and the weekend of festivities to come. It isn’t work but a pleasure, knowing that only a few short hours separate us from another blessed family reunion. 

After all the weeks of preparation, we are nearly there, ready to celebrate this new beginning for Robbie and Emma. And I am so happy ... fighting the tears as another of our boys gets married, the third in three years. So happy, and yet tinged with sadness that those special years have slipped past. I know, to be replaced by new special years, but still ...

Of course we’re approaching Advent, the church season in which we anticipate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ into this dark world. It makes me think of Mary, that very special young woman who was waiting to give birth to the Saviour of the world. How excited she must have been, anticipating the birth, and yet tinged with possible apprehension about just what it would all mean.

The Bible says that after the birth, as shepherds and kings came to worship Jesus, she watched, and ‘pondered these things in her heart’.

Sometimes our feelings are just too much for words.