On the weekend, while presenting at a retreat for Spiritual Directors, following a re-mem-ber-ing your favorite Bible story exercise, a participant shared a story with me that I share here, with her permission. Early in her nursing career, she told me, she was an OB nurse, and one day, one of her fellow nurses shared that the father of a newborn brought his 3-year old daughter in to his wife’s hospital room to visit her mother and meet her new baby brother. While mom and dad were visiting, the 3-year-old slipped over to the crib that held the new born and said to him, “Little Brother, tell me about God. I’m forgetting his face.”
A number of traditions include stories of angels hushing babies inside of the womb or taking action, otherwise, to cause them to forget the secrets of heaven they had known prior to birth. Some accounts even say that it is through the process of being born that the infant forgets and that it is over the course of a lifetime that one remembers what was known before and forgotten during birth.
When I heard her story, I was reminded of some of those stories I had read, and I could not help but wonder what if…What if the journey of a lifetime is to see and to discover more and more of God’s face…and then to help others see it or, at the very least, have the desire to do so. Oh yeah, and to do all we can to keep holding God’s face in sight…lest we forget.
May you see God’s face today or have some encounter that will help you remember.
I am a storyteller, a poet, a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a lover of life, a lover of God, a lover of words and of The Word. Proverbs 12:25 says: “Anxiety weighs down the human heart, but a good word cheers it up.” That’s what I desire to do – Share a good word!
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