One year two of our kids approached me with that unique look in their eyes. You know, the one where they are feeling tentative about the words they are ripe to speak. My attention came into sharp focus.
For separate reasons, each of them asked if their friend could come stay with us for awhile, for respite. The yes tumbled out of my mouth before they could finish all of the carefully construed points.
"Of course." I had not even asked John, but then I didn't need to.
There will never be a day when we have repaid the people who took in our children, when they went wandering. Or the woman who opened her home to my mother when she had burned all of her bridges with manic frenzy, and had no place to lay her head. Maybe our efforts will build up equity toward the kind souls who may give Benjamin safe haven after we are gone.
There have been dozens of people who have sought refuge under our roof for a day or two, or a few months. We have tucked them into extra bedrooms, or the attic, or merely the couch. A mother with small children and no job, a high school girl banished from the dorm, college students, friends of friends, a niece who had lost her way.
I don't have an inflated sense of grandiosity for these small tokens of hospitality. People who are feeling like nomads don't leave a heavy footprint.
It is simply the right thing to do.
Marriage is intended to be a place of safety for one another. Our visitation on this planet is less than the time it takes a sequoia to reach the clouds, or a bowhead whale to complete its migration beneath the waves. It is briefer than the process of a river carving its bed through the red rocks of the Colorado basin, or the tedious accumulation of pressure in the tectonic plates.
Yet I have seen the same look in God's eyes, as He waits to see if I will say yes. Yes, I will be a safe haven for this, His child.
