The Epilogue

Today there is a mixing bowl on the counter and the cookbook is open to the familiar page. I already know the recipe, but now I realize there is so much more to knowing than the words on the page.  I even acquired the taste for measure and order, timing and balance!  And I don’t think that creativity has been diminished by it in any way. I understand now that there is nothing simple in three simple ingredients and how you mix them together.

Like there is nothing simple in faith… hope… and love.  And how they get mixed together in the mixing bowl of life.

I want to pick up the phone and call my mother-in-law. Make a pie together.

But I know I will never make another peach pie with Mom here again.

For she is ready to enter another kitchen and make heavenly pies with Jesus.  It could be days. Perhaps weeks. We are saying our good-byes.

I think of that summer when our son turned the knob on the stove and incinerated the first peach pie. The memory is sweet.  And the memory is bitter.

Sweet like the peach pie filling.

Bitter like all good-byes are bitter. No matter how inevitable they are.  No matter how expected.  No matter how much we try to prepare for them.

And in each goodbye the ache of emptiness left behind lingers as if to remind us that our reach here indeed exceeds our grasp… that we are made for more… that the best pies here are just a foreshadowing of something so much more infinitely better…

…Do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope… I Thessalonians 4:13-14

Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. John 14:1-3

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. I Corinthians 13:13