Me and my “bitty-boy,” enjoying the rope swing.

She asked what my sense of God was and it came like a flash in my
mind.

Levi is my
“uppie” boy still at three and a half. 
Lately he’s taken to bargaining to achieve a place on my hip.

“If you take
me uppie, I will give you a kiss,” he says with his face lifted and searching.

Lifting him
to sit on my side or to straddle my belly, he presses his chapped lips to my
check all satisfied sweetness and light with his short skinny arms twined back
beneath my hair – he clings to my neck like heavy fruit hanging on the
vine. 

I don’t know
why he’s obsessed with being “up,” except that he’s the youngest (by nine
minutes) and that it probably has to do with being, for a brief while at least,
on eye level with those who so often tower over him.  He’s not so easily dismissed this way and
that boy, he wants to be taken seriously almost as much as he wants to be
babied.

His eyes
have changed lately, though I couldn’t tell you when.  Once a pale blue, they’re now a deeper shade, something between
blue and green.  Sometimes when he’s
telling me something, pressing his words on me with a sense of urgency and
importance, I get lost in his eyes and the long gently curved lashes that frame
them. 

Fine blond
eyebrows follow the curve of his brow and I watch for the wrinkle he was born
with, the furrow that shows itself sometimes still on the inside end of his
left brow when he scrunches his face in play or in pain.  Lost in his
eyes and face I stop listening to the words and marvel somehow at the fullness
of him.  

Sensing the shift, he doesn’t let me get away with it for long.  When he’s
riding high on my hip and my attention wanders his little hands
reach up, firmly framing my face, one on each cheek, as he turns my head, not
gently, toward himself.  With his hands,
he shifts my focus and – should I persist, say, in talking to my husband or
checking on dinner by turning my head away – he reaches out again and again to
turn me back toward himself. 

“This is my
sense,” I say, “of God right now.”  

God who
speaks at eye level as I listen, drawing me into his eyes, the fullness that
exists beyond individual words.  God who
reaches with a hand, persistent and demanding, like a child, turning me again
and again to himself.

“If you take
me, I will give you a kiss,” God whispers and I am forever turned and turning toward those
words and the eyes beyond them, turning toward the heart that seeks me, that
turns me toward itself. 

How does God get your attention these days?

I’m happy to be linking up with #TellHisStory this week.