Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that give you hope.
For the past year, my little girls have been asking me if they can bring their large rabbit and kitty bolster pillows to the mission field.
Given their size and our limited luggage space, I had to say a heartbreaking no.
On a recent Sunday, just days after the neurosurgeon had cautioned me to hold on tight as he ordered more investigations, I chanced upon a pop-up shop selling colorful kids’ bolsters, each perfectly vacuum-packed so they could be folded up easily like origami.
I had never seen anything like that all my life. Bolsters yes, but not kiddie ones vacuum-packed like they were.
“Are you usually here?” I asked.
“No,” the owner replied. “I set up shop here just for today.”
I stood, stunned. We could have been elsewhere that weekend.
When I saw the price, I took a double take. I felt it was way too much.
But as I walked away, I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me, “ I’ve provided what you and your girls have been hoping for for months. What is stopping you?”
It was then I had an epiphany— God is not the harsh disciplinarian parent I had made him up to be, tight-fisted and miserly for reasons too grand for me to know. He is not the harsh parent waiting to drop the next bomb onto me, even as I grapple with my pain and health condition.
Rather, He is a good father. Not only to me, but to my girls too.
With all the changes associated with our transition, God knew how much their bolster pillows, which gave them comfort to sleep through the night, meant to my little girls. I remember the night I put them to bed in tears, they shouted out at me, “God will heal you, Mama! He is a Good, Good Father!”
As I bought the two bolsters, and saw a rainbow later that week appear in the sky even when it had not rained the night before nor that morning, I held onto them as a sign of hope that God would see our family to the airport and crossover to Tanzania. We’d not seen rainbows for months but had witnessed three just around our home in the past two weeks, when my hope wore thin.
As silly as it seems, these are what I’m holding onto.