Daniel

What beautiful little people. They run out ahead of us. Run on after us. Fill us with the echoing deep--the questions we can't answer. But they ask them again and again until we remember that we've always wanted to ask them too. But what a little person you are, my son, when I look into your face and wonder at all things you will do. The parts of you I'll never know. The parts I'll know so well. The way you'll go beyond us--you'll step into a wider universe and carve a longer path and somehow on this day you were born I'm reminded that I will die. But you will go on and then your son and God knew you before you were born and knew your face and the way you would smile and that quiet moment when it was just you and me in the darkness on soft white sheets and you were breathing so softly I could hardly hear you and your soul was so close to mine and you were God's. I knew you were His before you were mine and it comforted me. It's hard to not feel afraid of all the times people will hurt you and all the times they won't see your soul the way I do--and it's because they don't know you...and because we don't know ourselves and we don't know God. That's why we ignore strangers and quietly hate the ones that are boring or ugly or too needy. We can't see them as sons and daughters of somebody. What could they have been? What was the name God gave them when they were born? Did anyone look at them in the darkness on soft white sheets and see their soul? You are beautiful, my son.