Snuggle in deep

Lord, my heart is not haughty,
Nor my eyes lofty.
Neither do I concern myself with great matters,
Nor with things too profound for me.

Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a weaned child with his mother;

Like a weaned child is my soul within me. Psalm 131:1-2

My first response to this Psalm was: David doesn’t know what he is talking about.   He obviously has never met Evie, the great flopper.  There cannot be any metaphor in the world as calm and quieted as that child being passed from arm to arm from doting aunt to gramma to friend to neighbor back to poppa again.    Nothing phases her. Howling Pippen and Bruce? Nope.  Four feet away from the pounding drums at church? Nope.  Pulsing disco dance parties full of middle schoolesque nerds?  Nope.  She is the great flopper, calm and quiet.  

Except when she isn’t.  Now, Miss Evie doesn’t howl or throw fits.  But she does grunt and squirm in the most unbecoming way when she wants what she wants and there is nothing you can do to dissuade her.  All the jostling and shushing and soft singing falls on deaf ears.  She wants momma and she wants her right now.  Now, with a capital.  

But a weaned child with her mother is different.  That little weaner has moved past the I-know-what’s-best-for-me-now stage.  

At some moment in time, the Loving Source will decide to say, “No.”  And I imagine that there will be a fair amount of fussing and fretting.  Now. Now. Now. I know what I want–totally oblivious to all that there is waiting for her in the great big world, chocolate truffles for instance.  Or barbecued ribs with horseradish.  But the point is, as some moment in time, Little Evie is going to push through the I-want-what-I-want moment and learn to trust at a whole new level.  

And she will still clamber up onto her mother’s breast.  For comfort.  For stillness.  Calm and quiet.  Not about me and my tummy needs.    Not about saying what is what, and how everything is going to work out.   But about being in her love.  At rest.

I bless you prison. I bless you for being in my life. For there, lying on rotting prison straw, I learned the object of life is not prosperity, as I had grown up believing, but the maturing of the soul. –Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Selah.