Light Givers

I've not been myself lately and I am praying about peace and forgiveness to get relief from old weights I thought were buried and gone.  Nothing is happenstance and, for those that believe that, there are always lessons to learn or solutions to find, because sometimes a lesson takes a few times to take.

Some believe we are the architects of our own lives and help create foundations for those around us, some we love but also some we cannot see, all of us intertwined by chance or design or whatever you want to call it, and what I believe to be God and his Grand Design who knows much more than I what my purpose is and my contributions will be.

There are chance meetings all the time, if you believe in that, which I don't, and people come into our lives who profoundly move and impact it, and we are drawn to them strongly and let them take us where we are meant to go but can't go by ourselves, traveling in tandem as we head into the sun.

You know what I mean, probably, and have a spot of sun in your own lives somewhere, someone you long to be around and who fills your life with nothing but good. And so the challenge really is spotting the simple heart should it stop like a beggar at our door in a cloak covered in dust.

I think my husband is a giver of light. He is a rescuer of lives, although meeting him in play he would not appear so. He has worn many hats and lived many lives before finding one that fits comfortably: soldier, ski bum, bartender, salesman, silkscreener, roofer, musicman. He became a father mid-stream, which I am told began as more of a trickle than a gush, and by degrees he waded in before discovering he was wholly in love with the lot of them, and filled a gap that these wonderful, smart, loving young people desperately needed with tenderness and devotion.

If he were here and telling the story, he would say that it is they who carry the light in his life and that I have it the other way around. But he would be wrong, at least about the part where he is not a light giver. I wonder if it is catchable, or learnable, a precise moment when you begin living from a vulnerable place in your heart.

Someone once said that what remains of a person is not what they did, but how they made you feel while in their company. I live the truth of that every day, as I close my eyes and feel my Light Givers, my father and brother - and now my husband - and their powerful gifts of joy. I think that is how I knew my husband before he knew me, because even standing near him I could feel his heart.