Here's just one way to speak love... Oatmeal pumpkin cookies. And the icing has maple syrup added in...a delightful discovery that I plan to put in future icings! This particular recipe came from CHOW.
One of my children once told me that she loved the secure feeling of seeing cookies in the cookie jar. It was one of those things that spelled H-O-M-E. Those cookies were far more than treats. They meant that there was a Mama in the home who was always there...for baking or cooking or mending broken hearts or cleaning tree-climbing wounds or listening to secrets or reading books...whatever the day or hour or situation, there was always a Mama within reach. Love is spoken in many languages, and I suppose a jar full of cookies is one of those languages.
We recently finished a missionary biography about Wilfred Grenfell, and near the end of the book, there was a description of love that struck my heart. Wilfred and his wife Anne had spent their lives working together in ministry to the fishermen and other families on the Labrador Coast. Near the end of their lives together, Anne was very weak from surgery for a stomach tumor, and Wilfred knew she would be going to her Heavenly home very soon. He wrote a note to a friend: "Now that the final goal seems not so far away, we are holding hands closer than ever, confident that the final experience of life also will be easier to face then and indeed become another joyous adventure, when these worn-out bodily machines of ours shall be discarded, and on the other side we shall work again in a new field together." What a precious love and life work they had shared together! And there was the realization that their love would go on beyond this earthly life...that there would be new adventures for them together on the other side. They had a thread connecting their souls.
Genuine love is eternal.
Amid all the stuff that clutters our lives, we can often forget about those things that matter most...the things that aren't really things at all. A plate of cookies, a meal shared around a table, a hug when we most need it, encouraging words that are spoken at just the right time...these things can be submitted to flame, and when it all burns away, what is left is love...simple and eternal.
