Sunday started awkwardly, with our alarm mysteriously failing to ring and wake us up. January is already like Monday of the year, and this was the beginning of it, right after the holidays. So we showed up late and I didn’t have enough caffeine in my system, thus, a dreamlike version of the church was playing between my ears.
I was in charge of the “Morning Prayers,” which come after “Announcements,” “Opening Prayer,” and two songs, in our Worship Program. So I hurried my mug of coffee, hoping to be bright enough when my turn came, around 15 minutes later…wishful thinking.
An extraordinary amount of prayers and praises came forward. I started writing on the back of the program, as always. When I ran out of space, the corners on the program side became handy. I started filling them clockwise so I could pray in the same order. When those four were full, the headers were my salvation, top first, bottom last. God was merciful, and the last prayer request fit perfectly in the last piece of unwritten paper.
The prayers, their flow, wording, etc. went well, as if God were taking care of them in spite of me. When finished, I sat down, with relief and perfectly awake now.
While we were singing the next worship song, the lyrics made me realize that I had forgotten a little girl's praise and her young mother's prayer request, for her father and her husband, respectively. So right after the song, and just before the Tithes and Offerings, I grabbed the microphone again, apologize to them and the church for it, and then did the praise and the prayer.
I sat again and held my wife’s hand, feeling that I had finally accomplished my assigned obligations for the morning, and was lucid enough to listen attentively to the sermon.
And then she came, out of the blue, walked to my seat, leaned towards me, and hugged me, briefly but forcefully. For her, for the church and even my wife, it was something sweet, a natural response to what I had just done. I heard a few “aw” while she walked back to her seat and then everything went back to normal, and everybody went back to worship. For me, however, it was only sinking in…
For starters, her gesture was shocking, because I felt more guilty for forgetting their requests (and having to do them inopportunely), than worthy of such honor.
Then, her embrace was overwhelmingly beautiful. Like the hug that a little kid gives to a parent after a long day of absence, it was full of true joy and gratitude. Like the one you give to an old friend when you find each other by coincidence after years apart, it was full of spontaneity and reassurance. Like the last one a teenage girl gives to her father before leaving home to go to college, it was memorable and full of significance. Like a hug one gives to an older person, it was full of respect and compassion. Like the greeting of a puppy in comparison to that of a mature dog, her youthful hug was full of enthusiasm and happy energy. Like a reconciliatory hug, it was full of forgiveness and comfort. Like the hug of an angel, it was full of divine healing and fraternal love… A true glimpse of heaven!
You would expect it to evoke similar emotions, but no, it caused a chemical reaction instead.
So the sermon hadn’t even started when the first tears became unstoppable. My brain was trying to make sense of it, and kept replaying the hug like a video clip. The surprise of it, every sensation, feeling… Emotions are made of water and when they exceed the limits of the human body, the overflow manifests in the form of tears... I was flooded with joy and the spring was outpouring some more. My soul was spinning upwardly; my heartbeat was loud and frolic; my face felt very hot, probably blushing; and my mind was trying to recover from its whimsical state.
The sermon didn’t help, as the breeze of its words was enkindling the flames, rather than extinguishing them.
At the end of the service, I thanked her for the hug and confessed how it made me cry. But, of course, I failed to mention how impressive and precious it had been.
I don’t have a daughter, so I don´t know what it’s like. But I suspect this is the closest I’ve been to the likely feeling of it, a truly amazing one...
As weeks went by, I stopped trying to understand it, I gave up the idea of getting over it someday, much less forgetting it. Instead, I hung it up, proud and glorious, in the gallery of my heart, as one of the most beautiful events of my life.
Thank you!
Written just after the first weekend in 2015