I was painting in the garage, and she was drawing a rainbow on the cement floor with chalk when she said, “I’m glad God gave you to me as my Mommy.”
I wasn’t ready for it. “What?” I asked, making sure I heard her right. She tried to say it again, but her words came out a little more awkward this time, and she said something like, “I’m happy you’re my mommy from God.”
Tears filled my eyes.
Then she prayed:
“God, thank you for giving my mommy to me. And thank you (I couldn’t understand this part.) And thank you, she makes me breakfast. And thank you we’re going to make pumpkin spagotti (biscotti). I hope it tastes good. Do you think it will taste good, God?”
Then she opened her eyes, and went back to drawing her chalk mural — while my eyes blurred with tears, and a huge lump came to my throat. Where did that come from?
She’s 3…and I didn’t know her little heart could hold such gratitude. Or that it would just burst out of her, during this subtle moment in the garage. Or that she would thank God, out loud, for me, right then.
Usually, she doesn’t even want to pray out loud — even with me encouraging her. But today she felt something inside her.
Something beautiful.
Her little heart can hold more love than I often know.
Her little mind…is not so little as I think it is. She thinks far beyond what I would expect.
“Thank you, Selah,” I said, smiling. “I’m so glad God gave me you as my daughter.”
I would have hugged her right then, if my hands didn’t have white paint on them, and if there wasn’t so much junk between us on the floor. The drawers I was painting, and an old wooden chair.
“Did you have to wait a long time for me Mom?” she asked. (I have told her the story many times, but she wanted to hear it again.)
I stepped across the junk on the floor and came a little closer to her. “Yes,” I said. “I asked God for a baby over and over again. But He didn’t give me one for a long time.”
“And when me and Daddy found out you were in my tummy, we were so happy!” I told her.
“Do you know why God took so long to give you a baby?” she said.
“No, honey,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“I know why,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because…He was making me,” she said.
He was making me.
I looked into her deep blue eyes, that seemed to know something from another world, and her blonde tousled hair rustled in the breeze. And in that moment, she seemed a thousand years old.
He was making me.
And that answer was enough. And my heart resounded with the truth of it, “Of course He was. Of course, that’s exactly what He was doing, Dear One.”
Because now that I know her, and know how special she is — it only makes sense, that it took so long. I don’t know what God was doing with her up there. There is just something about her, that seems as if she spent a long time on God’s chest before coming to mine. Almost as if heaven didn’t want to give her up.
