Skills and Stirred Hearts
When Ray and I go to the homeschool convention in Duluth, we like to spend time in Canal Park, a shopping area bordered on one side by Lake Superior and on the other by a canal.
An aerial lift bridge that opened in 1905 spans the canal. The bridge is Duluth’s most recognized landmark. Friday was so warm that we took an evening stroll, including a thrilling windy walk across the bridge. The next morning a snowy mix was falling.
We admired the handmade creations in the Art Deck, a sparkling store I remembered from our last convention here. It is brimming with jewelry and baskets and other skillfully-created crafts. I especially liked the hundreds of stained glass window ornaments of varying shapes and colors and sizes hanging from the ceiling and all over the large store windows.
For Christmas Ray had given me a bracelet and the promise of a charm to go on it. We have been keeping our eyes open for a special charm since then. At the Art Deck, I found some that were reasonably-priced and narrowed it down to two by the same artist. Both were openwork silver ovals. One had a heron inside and the other a moose. When I asked Ray which he liked best, he wouldn’t tell me. He would only say he wanted me to have the one I wanted.
I knew I would be sorry if I didn’t get the moose, because our family has a special memory of a dark night when we drove through a Maine forest and saw a moose by the side of the road. Our Bethany made one of those duh-slap statements that we all make sometimes, and, being her loving family, we have never let her forget it. You know what a duh-slap statement is–it’s followed by a “duh” and a palm slap to the forehead.
The moose charm reminds me of my giving husband and Bethany who keeps us in stitches; a family drive in Maine and the nighttime glitter of Canal Park; a walk with Ray across the aerial lift bridge and ice cream with John, Audra, and Henry on a frigid Saturday night. It reminds me of the breathtaking beauty God created when He made Lake Superior with its shining water, great sheets of ice, and tree-lined shores.
Before church on Sunday morning, Ray and I went to Canal Park one more time. After breakfast at a bakery beneath the Art Deck . . .
. . . I slipped upstairs where I took some window photos of the art store and a nearby candy store. Inside the candy store, I saw the only person in any of the closed stores–a gray-haired lady dressed in black. As she bent down behind the counter, I looked closer. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she had found something to do while she looked. She was eating a chocolate.
I read later that a mother opened the candy store about twenty-five years ago and that her daughter later succeeded her as owner of the store. For some time the mother continued to help almost every day. Maybe she still does. I wonder if it was the mother or daughter whom I caught enjoying candy on Sunday morning.
Creating beautiful art, baking, and building a successful candy business to pass down to a daughter are three of the many ways people in Duluth use their talents in ways that help other people.
Each of your children is gifted. Each has traits and talents that can grow and that can bless others. Some of the joys of motherhood are watching for those talents, helping children develop them, and training them to use them with willingness and joy.
Then they can be like the willing Israelites who helped build God’s Tabernacle.
Then Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab
and every skillful person in whom the Lord had put skill,
everyone whose heart stirred him,
to come to the work to perform it.
Exodus 36:2, NASB