Picture This

          If dictionaries had to have illustrations by every word I wonder what some of them would be?  How would you illustrate a concept, an idea, an emotion?   Sometimes life gives us illustrations--those "a picture is worth a thousand words" moments.
          Ron was pricipal of an elementary school where our own children were students.  I loved to show up on campus.  Ron could rarely be found behind his desk because he liked to be where the action was--and that was always where the children were--so he would be in a corridor or a classroom or on the playground or the cafeteria interacting with his kids.
          One day I was at his school at lunch time.  I was beside him as he wandered from table to table encouraging, teasing,and sometimes correcting his little charges.  Nodding across the room to a table where a little boy sat beside a young woman, Ron whispered to me, "His  leukemia has come out of remission and he probably won't make it this time.  But he wants to be at school and his parents have agreed to try to keep his life as normal as possible so they let him come to class.  That's his mom.  She doesn't want to miss a minute of the rest of his life so she comes with him everyday just to watch him and be near him."
          I can still see them in my mind as if it were yesterday and it still makes me weep.  What word would a picture of that mother and son fit beside in the dictionary?  Devotion.  Fear.  Heartache.  Commitment.
          And what picture could illustrate love and grace and justice and mercy and redemption?  Most profoundly, the cross.

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead  in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.
                                                                                                                   Ephesians 2:4, 5