“Mama, come play a game of I Spy?”
It’s evening, and I’ve just returned from the grocery store. The kitchen is overflowing brown bags and boxes. My youngest son, Isaiah, calls from the dining room. My oldest son, Logan, home from college, had taken him Christmas shopping.
I step over a box brimming with produce and follow Isaiah’s voice. He’s stands near the table, green eyes bright. “I’ll go first and you guess!” he says. He scans the room and his tongue hooks the corner of his mouth. “I see something silver.”
I look to the buffet. To the cabinet in the corner. To the life-clutter on the table. “The candleholders,” I say.
Isaiah’s eyes go round, and he dips his blond head toward the piano. After a second, I see there’s a new snow globe on top. It’s silvery and vintage. It’s beautiful. My breath catches and I hold the cool, round globe in an instant.
“It’s to make up for the one,” Isaiah says.
I’m puzzled. I bend my knees to kneel beside him.
“For the one I broke last year,” he explains. “Logan helped me buy this one to replace it.”
Logan smiles and nods, and I turn the key on the bottom of the globe. The quiet room goes full with dainty notes. I admire the angel through the glass dome. She holds a wreath under a silver-glitter shower.
Isaiah loops one arm around my neck and touches my cheek with his other hand. “Remember, how I dropped your snow globe? It broke and the music still played. The sparkly water ran into the gaps in the floor.” His face flushed and his eyes filled with tears. “It was so, so sad.”
Truth is, until this moment I didn’t remember the shattered snow globe. The brokenness had long been forgotten. But being here, in the dining room, music box singing and silver flakes falling and in precious proximity of tenderhearted boys, I remember, and I begin to understand that this forgetting, this removing of transgressions, is a bit like God’s love.
You know that he appeared to take away sin, and in him there is no sin. (I John 3:5, ESV)
When I trust in Jesus as Savior, my mistakes, my sin, my shame, are long forgotten. When the Lord looks at me, he sees them not. He sees the holy, white, clean, clear righteousness of His own son.
My Redeemer.
My Savior.
Jesus Christ. The amazing gift of Christmas.
My throat suddenly feels tight, and my spirit swells in my chest. My son knows just exactly when to press into my arms. Happiness, the redeemed kind that washes over spirit and soul and fills the heart to the deepest place, becomes mine anew.
“What do you think?” Isaiah asks.
“I’m grateful,” I say.
For the snow globe. But mostly for the love and grace that brings Christmas joy.
