Just some thoughts:
Last night my wife and I attended the Amy Grant and Vince Gill Christmas show at the Ryman Auditorium here in Nashville. Great show, we never miss their Christmas shows. Midway into the second half of their show, Amy sat down on a stool and said, “I want to do something a little different here. I realize that what I am going to do is not necessarily Christmas related in your minds, but maybe when I explain, you will understand how it’s Christmas related to me.”
She said that very early in her career, in her twenties, her mother asked her to write a poem that she could share with a ladies’ group that her mother often met with. Amy asked her the subject she was to write about, and her mother said, “Aging.” Amy wrote the following, which she quietly read to the audience.
It occurred to me this morning as I washed this face of mine,
How quickly come the changes with a little passing time
A wrinkle here, a hair turned gray, a not so lilting step,
I see me growing older, but I don’t quite feel it yet,
At times I nearly feel my age, at others I’m sixteen,
So full am I of all the thoughts and feelings in between.
Who would have thought the road of life would twist and turn so much?
The journey makes me strong and weak and tender to the touch.
And so this day I face the choice that I have faced each day,
Will I be open? Teachable? Unafraid of change?
Yes.
I will embrace this moment. Forgive my past mistakes,
And remember that just showing up is sometimes all it takes
I’ll see the kind of beauty that time cannot erase.
Wisdom and experience resting on my face.
She wrote the last half of that poem twenty years later and what she said was, “with some firsthand experience.” When she finished reading she commented,
“My mother died this past July; this will be our first Christmas without her."
Nothing further.
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December 22, 2010
Keep on
Larry Adamson