No Fingerprints

My back door looked like this for weeks.  I don't think that they show very clearly in this photo, but there are fingerprints all over the lower panes.  Small fingerprints.  Made by the sweet little fingers of my faraway grandchildren.  And although the children have been gone since the Monday after Thanksgiving, I could not bring myself to clean the marks off of my back door.   

So while I was decking the halls for Christmas, the fingerprints remained.

Kati invited some friends over for games and Christmas treats in early December, and I fully intended to clean the door before her friends came.  But that evening found me scurrying around to get ready for my shopping date with Ron, and I forgot.

So I just never got around to doing it.  And all during the month, I'd look over at those panes and smile, remembering.

On Tuesday, my friend Mary called to say that she was stopping by to drop something off.  And the fingerprints of Eve, Nora, and Peter had become mixed with those of the nearby grands and our own month's worth of fingerprints and the cats' nose prints.  And I decided that it was time to make those panes sparkle again.

But the clean glass does not sparkle as much as the memories that are living in my heart.   

And besides, I have my stones.  

The morning they left, as we were saying our good-byes, Eve bent down and picked up a stone out of the driveway, handed it to me, and said, "This is to remember me by."  Then Nora also handed me a stone.  I tucked them into my pocket, and after we had watched until their car was no longer in sight, I brought those stones in and set them on the windowsill above my kitchen sink.  

Yes, Eve and Nora, I remember.

And isn't that what Christmas is to the believer...a remembrance?  Our meager attempt at remembering His coming?  A few tangible ways to point to the Word made flesh, and to share our joy at what that means?