We’re listening to SELAH sing “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross” and I am blending butter into flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder. The words are memorized but they are revealing something all new and my hands still. From counter to sink, wash. Then towel to drawer, I grab one small heart shaped sticky note and write with purpose, “My sin, not in part, but in whole. It is nailed to the cross so I bare it no more.”
Shaking, I stick it at eye level right to the window.
Throat feels thick and my eyes are stung.
How I have held on, too often, to my painful mistakes. Still believing I may not be enough for my King to except me.
My arms fold across my chest and try to swaddle what and who I am ashamed of. I read it again. First tear falls. I let go long enough to swipe at moisture, what feels like a crack in the dough of my skin.
Little boy is spinning and bouncy with a big blue ball across the kitchen floor and hears the same song but doesn’t know life. Not yet. Although he does know punishment. I have doled it out myself. Between bounces his eyes flash over at my stature, then at my face for my voice no longer carries notes. He slows but never stops. No, not he. Never stops ’til sleep holds him.
He asks what I just wrote. I say the words out loud. Slow. And try to explain simply. My voice quiet, low, focused on not letting it break, but the words are still THERE! Right in front of me and all around me and I start to realize what I thought I had asked for forgiveness, I never let go of. Not fully.
What did I think? That Jesus, the Son of my Creator, went through fear, shame, and severed self to only handle what I was willing to give Him? My pride had gone before me all along. My sins. They cannot be separated like eggs from their yolks. I either must let them go or allow them to hover in this house, in this life. The words spoke plain. “Not in PART, but in WHOLE”. “It is nailed to the cross so I, (me, this person, this sinner, this ugly self-loathing pride) bare it NO MORE”.
He is four, but his question arises as if from one wiser than I, “But Mom, what if you have one mistake, just one mistake today. Would He take that one and just throw it up….there?”.
He needs to speak in a literal form, to talk in concrete actions. What lies before this very day at this very moment. His belief beginning to form in what I will teach him RIGHT NOW. My love flows, and I am swept to lower self and we talk. Right there on the kitchen floor where outdoor sand has trailed in. My cold butter warms like the blood in my veins, and I’m not thinking of that but rather of all I have hated myself for and what truths can I teach myself and let him hear? He needs this. And my need is there too with history to fill in shameful stories and why have I clung to these? How heavy they have been.
Minutes pass and his attention shifts and he’s off to another motion filled activity and I stand, feeling more whole than I have felt in a long time. I wash my hands and begin kitchen work again. Staring at those words. I will brand them into this soul. I will take one step closer to the pure grace of the One who hung for ALL my falling and failing. And I pray, for little boy and his heart, and I give thanks. Purely unworthy. Thanks.
In pure search,
~kathy
kathy brower 