This past week I spent several nights wondering why sleep had flown the coup. I mean really why does the mind just decide to stay awake? The normal routine had seemed to fail me once again. How many nights of little to no sleep can one have. I am no super hero. This body began to scream for some actual rest.

Much of the last ten years for me has been sleeplessness. There are benefits to wakefulness all night long. One of these is the many hours i have spent listening to my mp3 player read the Bible to me. I would not be alive today but for the sanity that the constance of God’s word has lent to me in those hours of un-sleep.

Lately, it seems the beast of awake has taken me under wing again. Sometimes, I don’t know it is good or bad. Surely the enemy does not want me to spend all those hours meditating on God’s word. Am I really that anxious and fretful that my mind will not slow down long enough to sleep?

Tonight, I have a little sinus bug that is putting a tickle down my throat that is so annoying. I got up to study some words that I have been pondering and find out what God’s word has to say about them. The first word is charity.

Some of us grew up reading the King James Bible and know the word from it’s long list of attributes in I Corinthians chapter 13. It is otherwise know as the “Love Chapter.” Many people choose this passage for sermonettes at their weddings. The long list of character traits to charity are often used in substitutional studies. Like putting Jesus in the place of Love, or even using one’s own name. Finding out one’s fault comings is simple when doing that. But looking for faults is not one of Charity’s blessings. Over looking them, IS.

The next word that stuck in my mind is Mizpah. Oh, boy, you might say, where did that come from? Well, in the Bible it is a momental stone to commemorate a parting in life’s travels. Like perhaps more of a “Rite of Passage” when two people go in separate directions. This happened in Laban and Jacob’s life. And was not meant as a bad thing, but rather a reminder that they both had the same Lord watching over them. Paul had many such partings in his ministry as recorded in the Book of Acts.

Today, the meaning is often skewed to be a marriage or love “Stone” like a diamond ring or something. I don’t think it was meant as such, for married people should not separate on life’s journey. Just my own opinion. (Sometimes it happens, okay, I get that.). And may I not de-emphasize that as a married individual, my husband and I are not together 24-7, so yes we wear the modern wedding bands.

Is Mizpah a commemorative stone of the the passage of life from this earth? I don’t think it was meant as a memorial either. But the separation blessing it certainly seems to be. What ever am I thinking of this so deeply for?

Today, my first daughter told her people what the gender of her coming fourth child is to be. Not for this blog, I might add. The moment of covenantal blessing for me came after the video was recorded and the eldest child expressed her wishes for the hoped for gender. Mama just chuckled her tell tale laughter and then later expressed, she had shed a few tears also. The cupcakes of color and been devoured, God has already decided. So I expressed my own prayer filled blessing. “Love multiplies. It does not divide, separate, or subtract. It always adds and then multiplies. More to love, means more love. Love multiplies. And we will live this little one just like we love you.”

I cannot put myself in my daughter’s shoes. She is walking her own journey through life. I had two daughters. Though I wanted more, God chose not to do that for me. Now, the Lord has granted my daughter the gift of childbearing. Charity begets charity. Love multiplies.

Neither can I walk in my second daughter’s working world. I am so proud of both my daughters. Their faith walk, their journey through life following the Lord’s leading inspires me to keep faith also. While it seems we have less connected moments that what I had imagined there would be through the “adult” years, there are brief moments in time that seem strong in the memories. One night recently we sat around the kitchen table once again with the ever growing family. For a brief moment that evening with either daughter on each side of me, I felt rich. Rich in this world of spiritual blessings and physically rich by the gifts that God has given me in my daughters.

This beautiful doily is a bit of my own fabrication. I dropped the original edging and added more hearts. The “mizpah” or commemoration is that love multiplies and we shall have more grandchildren, “the Lord willing.”