Life According To A Rocking Chair

I look at the old rocking chair and smile.
Many would look at that chair and think that there is nothing special about it.
But they would be wrong.
Terribly wrong.

Back in my early married life, I worked until the sixth month of my first pregnancy.
I had three long winter months to wait for our precious baby to be born.
The money I made while I worked was never used for us to live on.
We saved that money and used it to buy the furniture that we needed.

It was so wonderful to buy the nursery furniture.
Even then, I loved wood and knew that the warm colors would sooth and calm.
The last thing we needed to purchase was a rocking chair.
One was selected and brought home.

That chair waited patiently for the baby to arrive.
It almost seemed to sense the importance of its job.
It was the chair I sat in every night to feed my children.
It was our time, my child and me.

There is something about the call of a baby in the night.
You have to say no to yourself; refuse to turn over and pretend that you don’t hear.
That small child needs you for nourishment, and sustenance, and comfort.
And you need that small child if only to remember that it is not about you.

To sit in that rocking chair and hold each of my babies was a gift.
To sit together just the two of us late in the night or early in the morning was priceless.
The world was asleep.
We were awake but sleepy in our own right.

Two bonding.
Two snuggling.
Two hearts beating together.
Two lives intertwined.

That rocking chair was nothing special but it was a sacred place.
In those quiet moments, there was not two but Three.
Three present in the stillness.
God, my child, and me.

Everything in us wants what we want when we want it.
Becoming a mother suddenly changes all of that.
Now another is more important than you.
You would lay your own life down to protect your child.

You lay your life down every day in order to gain the life that is really Life.
Motherhood is closest to the heart of God than anything else.
Sacrifice, service, one-anothering, unconditional love.
I came to understand God more when I became a mother.

There was an old fashioned Winnie the Pooh in the nursery.
It sat on the rocking chair waiting for us to bring our first baby home.
It guarded the sacred place.
It held the spot, until.

When we pulled into the driveway the day we brought our daughter home, I saw it.
The old fashioned Winnie the Pooh was in the nursery window.
I gasped at the sight, thinking of all the old stories where stuffed animals come alive.
I imagined that precious Pooh bear hoisting himself up on the window ledge to see.

The nursery lookout.
The nursery sentry.
The symbol of childhood poised on the window ledge waiting for the gift to arrive.
I put him there, my husband said quietly and nothing could have been sweeter.

That old fashioned Winnie the Pooh was present at his post four more times.
He never got to sit on the window ledge for one little one who was just not strong enough.
One precious child who was never to be born.
One precious child I will one day meet.

I sat in the rocking chair even then.
Thinking of the child I would never hold.
Crying silent tears for the child I would never know.
Missing the time that I never got to have with that child in that chair, in that place.

The comfort of the rocking motion.
The creak of the left rocker against the floor as it bore the weight of two.
Holy ground.
And God was there.

The solemnity of the rocking chair.
The sheer bliss of the rocking chair.
The sacredness of the rocking chair.
The emptiness of the rocking chair.

Life according to the rocking chair.
Forgetting yourself for the sake of another.
Being held, being fed, being comforted.
God ordained moments; the holy in the ordinary.

Early the next morning, they arose and worshiped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah lay with Hannah his wife and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him, Samuel, saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.” (1 Samuel 1:19,20)

God remembers.
God understands.
God’s own Son was rocked in a sacred place by His mother.
God was there; God is there; God will always be there.