Passing the hands

Somehow I won't feel like I'm giving her away today when I take her hands and present them to her husband.

That happened years ago, seems like. Maybe as long ago as that day when she let two hard-hit grounders through her legs at third base then quit sports for good later in the day. She was 12. Twelve?

Or Somehow that happened when Katrina came and she went away from our home.

Somehow that happened when she had a child.

Or perhaps that happened with her first job, or her first car, or her first whatever.

You birth your children (and granted it is easier for me to talk about it than her mother), raise your children, release your children like some sort of fishing television program. And they're gone.

Carrie once told me that she knew I wanted us to be closer as a family, but we just weren't. Sad as that is, it's true.

But this I notice:

She is getting married in the same church that birthed my ministry, that married her sister, that confirmed both of the girls, that gave Bibles for both of them graduating.

She is getting married in the same area that still houses both my girls.

She is going on with life in the same manner, with me reading the same passage, as did her sister.

Close? Maybe not. But we are tethered together with slivers of love. She is marrying a man who loves the same team, the same game, as do I. She is marrying a man who loves dogs, same as I (though if I were the dogs, I would keep my eyes open at night).

There's a closeness that perhaps even Carrie doesn't realize or understand.

So we have another life-changing event today. And with it comes one step closer to the end of all our lives.

If you don't think time is passing quickly for us all, think about this: John Lennon would have been 70 today. What would John Lennon have been like at 70?

The Bible says of children: 2 Hear this, you elders;
listen, all who live in the land.
Has anything like this ever happened in your days
or in the days of your forefathers?
3 Tell it to your children,
and let your children tell it to their children,
and their children to the next generation.

Today my little girl, the one who was so hard-headed, who would never listen to me if I raised my voice, who screamed back at me when I yelled, "glove to the ground," as the balls skipped merrily into left-field, "I'm trying as hard as I can," takes another very adult-like step.

I will pass her to another man, though she has not been mine for so very long. I pray for their marriage, I pray for their parenthood, I pray for their finances, I pray for their choices.

I pray that she keeps trying as hard as she can. For in that is life, as we know it.