Love affair continued

I was walking down Limestone Avenue with my wife when I heard someone call out my name. I stopped and turned toward the voice. It was a member of our church. A mother with her two young children were sitting at an outdoor dining table eating pizza and playing cards. They were all smiles and quickly so were we. They seemed so happy to be with each other and happy to see us. When I thought about it later, it seemed like they were all set up on the sidewalk just waiting for us to come along so they could shout their joyful, Hello. I know that’s not what they were doing, but it felt like that. Isn’t that a great feeling to impress upon another person? A sense that you coming along was just what they were hoping would happen? 

What struck me then and resonates with me still is that they were playing cards. I don’t know why that touched me so. A family, a mother and her little ones, at a restaurant outside on a pretty night, cards in one hand a slice of pizza in the other, that just seems like an important scene from the love affair that this life is supposed to be. I was reminded of the woman in one of Jesus’ parables who snuck some yeast into a whole bunch of flour so that it would rise on the sly. This little card playing, pizza eating family was to me a little love gesture snuck by God into the evening traffic on a busy sidewalk in our city on an unusually comfortable night in late summer.

They were playing cards. That touches me for some reason. I don’t know why.