Like most Americans, I've
watched many a fireworks display in my life. From my vantage point in a folding
chair, the hood of a van, a church roof, a sandy patch of beach, or a wooden
front porch gazing across a field of soybeans, I've oohed and aahed in proper
patriotic style at blossoming spheres of colored light in the night sky.
But my July Fourth time travel
always carries back me to one specific fireworks show. I was in second or third
grade. My parents, older brother and I were on a grassy hill on a scratchy
blanket where we sat, watching and oohing and aahing.
I thought the fireworks were
pretty. I enjoyed the lights and colors. The big sounds made me a little
nervous, but they were exciting, too.
But the flash-boom ones - how
they terrified me. Perhaps you've seen them. No colors, no orb in the sky, just
a sudden, blinding flash of white accompanied by a deep explosion of sound so
loud you can feel it in your chest. I hated them.
As soon as one started I would
clap my hands over my ears and shut my eyes and try to keep it out, but it was
so bright and so loud and so fast that all the scariness got in under my hands
and eyelids.
Before long I was watching the
display peeking out between my fingers, my thumbs plugging my ears and my face
hidden behind the protective layer of my hands, crawling inside myself from
fear that another scary flash-boom was coming.
And then...I leaned against my
mom.
In retrospect, I feel bad for my
mom. She must have been sad that this special family outing had turned into a
terrorfest for her timid daughter.
But that night, as I trembled on
that hill, my mom was a tower of refuge for me.
I don't remember if she put her
arms around me. Probably she did. But the part I remember is the lean. And her
shoulder. And how good it felt to know that she was there.
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Mom died not quite seventeen
years ago. Three months later my first child was born, and suddenly I was a mother.
How I wished, in the midst of that terrifying flash-boom, that I had Mom to
lean on.
The fact is, even though we are
grownups, there are still things in life that make us tremble. Most of the time
we can see the beauty and excitement of life, the flash and sparkle of
opportunities and challenges in our sky. But there are hurts that stop
breathing in its tracks. Losses that make the heart crumple. Difficulties that
send us diving under the covers pulling a pillow over our heads, blind to all
else because the flash-booms are so overwhelmingly bright and loud and scary.
When life hurts, how I long for
my mother's shoulder.
But I am no longer a child. I
need to be able to handle these things on my own. My husband and children and
loved ones are there for me and dear to me, but they can't shield me from the
big booms. When it comes to facing what I tremble to face, there is no human on
the planet that can be my tower of refuge.
----------
But I lean. I lean on the only
One bigger than the flashes and the booms. I lean on a Father who doesn't keep
the big scaries from my life, but who is by my side in the midst of them. I
lean on the One who climbed a hill and laid down a life so that I might never
be alone.
The lean isn't always pretty. We
cry out to our God, questioning, accusing, pleading, defying. We lose our cool
with the kids, pound the steering wheel, sob into our pillows. And in the end,
when our hearts and lungs and eyes are exhausted, we lean. We simply lean.
And in the quiet, a shoulder is
there.
Our tower, our refuge, our
hiding place. Our strength. Our comforter. Our loving parent who is with us
when the lights are too bright and the noises are too loud.
I am not on my own. You are not
on your own. You are loved everlastingly by your Creator, you are bought by the
blood of His Son. Is the weight in your heart too much to bear? Then don't bear
it alone.
First published in The Alpena News on July 2, 2016
