19 years ago

 "How can you love someone so much you just met?"  I remember watching the movie, Where the Heart Is in the movie theater when it first came out in the year 2000.  I liked it.  It was OK.  But, for some reason, the line quoted above stuck in my mind.  Maybe it was the unusual phrasing that caught my attention. I don't know...but it intrigued me.  The protagonist, Novalee Nation, said it when they first placed her new born baby girl in her arms.  At the time, I was deep into my struggles with infertility, so the notion of holding a new born in my arms and finding out what this statement was all about was very foreign to me. 

Two years later, though, God made the miracle, and I got to experienced what Novalee meant in that scene...the incomparable explosion of love that a Mother feels when she first sees her new born baby.  It was so unlike anything I have ever felt in my life, that I didn't know what to do with myself...other than praise the Lord for His mercy and goodness...for His faithfulness, and for choosing me to be the Mother of this precious child.  

It's been 19 years today of this marvelous and wonderous event...and I still don't know what to do with myself.  For the first time, I'm not able to see Grant on his birthday, and that has made me very melancholic.  But, I rejoice knowing that he is enjoying it in his own way, in a new way.  As he is wrapping up his freshman year in College, he is learning to fly on his own. And though my heart breaks knowing the little baby boy I got to see for the first time, 19 years ago after 16 hours of labor is all grown up and out of the nest, I am happy to see he is happy too.

I don't know how the whole thing works.  I don't know how you can love someone so much you just met...but you certainly do.  It is a love so profound, that it aches.  Imagine, if in our imperfect ways it is possible for us to experience this kind of love for our children...how much so the love of Our Heavenly Father must be.  May we always remember we are loved with a love so deep that nothing we could ever do would be able to extinguish it, ever.  In the Precious Name of the One Who Taught us how to love because He Loved Us First.  Amen!