By DeAndrea Dare
If you give cat a string, it will often play for hours. A young child’s favorite present is often the box, bag, or tissue paper instead of what is actually concealed inside as a gift. The beauty of a sunrise or a sunset often takes one’s breath away.
There are moments in life that are complicated and confusing, full of drama and exhaustion. But more times than we often notice, life is filled with beautiful simplistic moments that are essentially sacred and full of meaning. You see it in the way a child’s face lights up when she sees her parent, in that split second when a bride’s and groom’s eyes connect for the first time, in the gentle way one person shares an umbrella with another walking through a rainstorm, in the smile of a homeless man simply waving at those who drive by him, or in the single silent tear that rolls down the face of one in grief at a funeral.
We fill our calendars with meetings and events, our minds race ahead of us full of information and questions, our bodies are tired from running from here to there. The demands are often steep, the deadlines loom, and we just race to get through the day so we can do it again tomorrow. Our lives are so full, yet we are hungry.
If we took the time, we could learn a lot from children and their love for tissue paper and a cat’s love for a single string. Yes, there is innocence, but there is also a simple beauty that comes from the elements of life that seem to be nothing and yet are everything.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Christ offers us life out of the most simplistic elements of our existence. Water. Bread. Relationships. The bread of life is given so we may have life; eternal life, abundant life and that begins now. The hunger we sense is not a hunger for more things to add to the calendar and check off of the to-do list. It’s a hunger for something deeper. Something so simplistic. Something we try to make so complicated. The well is deep, the bread is plentiful, and it awaits each of us every moment of every day.
Come eat, come drink, be loved. It’s that simple.
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