Friendsgiving Flowers

A couple weeks ago, three of my favorite friends and I celebrated the new holiday we dubbed Friendsgiving.  The morning after Thanksgiving, we made breakfast and ate together with the sole purpose of enjoying each other's company.  It is possibly my new favorite holiday. 

One thing I liked best about it was how truly restorative it was.  There was no pressure, just being the people we are and loving the people we were with. 

I bought some flowers for the table.  There's something about fresh flowers.  They fit into two vases and framed our meal well. 

The day after Friendsgiving, I kept one vase of flowers as the centerpiece  at my kitchen table.  The other I put on a shelf under my living room window. 

The most special part of Friendsgiving was the most special guest.  It was the first Friendsgiving for all of us, but it was more fun to call it Penelope's first Friendsgiving because the fact that she's only two months old means a lot of firsts for her every day.  Next week, Penelope is taking her first trip to the zoo, and soon she will have her first Christmas. 

Looking at Penelope at her first Friendsgiving, I thought it was amazing that so many people love her yet she is, at the moment, completely incapable to love them back.  I asked her mom, my good friend Clarissa, "Isn't it crazy to love someone so much who is literally unable to love you back, at least for now?" 

At first, Clarissa didn't agree with me.  (Clarissa seldom agrees with me at first.  It's part of the beauty of our friendship.)  "Penelope loves me."  She said.  "She knows my voice, she cries for me, she needs me.  She loves me." 

"But she doesn't," I argued.  "She knows you, and that, in a way, is love.  But she doesn't love you like you love her.  That's what I mean.  It's not reciprocal.  She can't love you back, she can never repay you for all the love you have already given her, in these short two months." 

Clarissa was quiet in thought.  "I guess you're right," she said.  "But it's enough that she knows me and that she needs me.  She loves me with that." 

I smiled.  Clarissa had the same thought.  "Sound familiar?" she said with a chuckle.

Clarissa has been telling me all the things she's learning about God by being a parent.  I appreciate that I can learn similar things by just being around Clarissa being a parent. 

He created something and has so much love for his creation though it can't ever love him back in the same measure.  But it's enough that we know him and need him.  We love him with that. 

And when we know him and need him, we stand and we flourish in the light of his love.

There are no windows in my kitchen, and today I threw away dried up, ugly flowers that have decorated my kitchen table for the past couple of weeks.  The water smelled funny and I cringed as I tossed them into the trash.  I wished they could last forever, but they couldn't without the proper light.  It had been the amount of time that flowers normally survive, so I walked over to the vase in my living room expecting those flowers to be dead and shriveled, too. 

But this is what I saw in the vase by the window.  Light had made them even more beautiful than when I bought them.  I couldn't believe it.  Their beauty was not their own; they knew and needed the light.