Dumplings

A dumpling is a flattened piece of dough wrapped around a mixture of goodness, sometimes with meat and sometimes just veggies. Sometimes, in my house, with chocolate.

I think this house is a dumpling in a way... pieces of wood and metal and plaster and whatever else is involved, wrapped around a mixture of goodness. Laughing parents, children running around and shrieking with joy, husbands and fathers talking and chillaxing and wives and mothers bantering with each other, kneading the dough and exchanging the latest gossip about secret recipes and outrageous sales, and of course Obama and his administration. I hear some jokes about aging, stories of a recent close family members' battle with cancer, wisdom laced with humor and solemnity of how beauty doesn't fade with years, nostalgic remarks about how their daughters are growing into women before their eyes... Compliments are thrown this way and that, yet they're all filled with such sincerity and love toward one another - this one about how one's most recent deal from the mall compliments her so well, that one directed toward her husband, "Look at your wife! Isn't she gorgeous?" Discussions, both frivolous and serious, about cruises and camping trips, and about what relationships look like in heaven, meld together with Canon in D played by my sister downstairs into a beautiful symphony of fellowship. 

Just four years ago, two of these people were not Christian, another two lived a couple hundred miles away, and another two were in a battle against a life threatening illness. Now, there's a newly adopted child in a family that was facing so much turmoil, and parents who had resisted their daughter's pleas to look to God are now talking joyfully about the New Jerusalem... Still more miracles have turned their faces now to the sun, and that makes sense when you think about it. The Son is their source to begin with.

Hearing all the chatter and the sounds of the kitchen, I wonder, what is my life going to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now? Hahah, maybe it's better that I let go of all the wonderings that I have and just live.