EPIPHANY PART I

Driving home from an outing with the children, I found myself reflecting on a collection of thoughts from the morning. The children and I had been at church in the morning, and at the end of the service, I noticed my oldest child looking at me, wondering what he was seeing in my eyes. As the service ended, I was overwhelming with emotion, this curious kind of emotion that looks like sadness to other people but really is a manifestation of humility when confronted with the power of God's love, and is in actuality an expression of happiness. I tried explaining this as such to a girlfriend on the way out of church when she asked about my wet eyes.
On the way out of church, my son wanted me to explain my tears. At one point, I stopped the car to look directly at him and explain this concept that I was getting in full doses, that I wanted him to understand. At home, we sat down and talked about it some more.
I was trying to explain to him the content of the sermon that had reached me on this emotional level. I also wanted him to get it for himself as well, to understand that this love that God had for us, for me, for his children, paralleled the love I have for my sons, and what it means, what's it worth, and what you have to do to get it. This conversation followed us in intermittent means throughout the day's events, and yet left me questioning some facets to it.
One of the points that was made in the scripture reading today, from Psalms, is that God's love comes from his knowing of us, that He knows us so well and intimately that the words we say, the things we do, come as no surprise to him. Have you ever loved someone like this? I think we all have. Children are full of surprises, for sure, but ultimately that's the feeling of "family" - that these are the people who really know you, who can anticipate the way you would respond to certain things, who know you so well that they sense what appeals to you and who you are.
As my son and I talked about this concept, and about family, and about expressions of love seen, said, and unsaid, his grandparents came up. This was related to a point I wanted him to get about my childhood, and The Void, and why God's unconditional love means so much to me. I asked him if his grandparents ever told him they loved him. He said they didn't say it, but he just knew that they did. I asked him how he knew, and he described certain actions, the way his grandmother took care of him, granted him things, prepared special meals for him. He told me that although his grandfather expressed these things less, he knew that he loved him "just a little bit more than Grandma does". When I asked him how he knew that, he told me that his grandfather just seemed to know what he liked, that it was like they had a special connection or something. When I pressed him for examples (because I could not imagine my father beginning a conversation with him about, say, Bakugan or something), he described situations where my father acted on a perceived interest of my son's, and presented him with something that appealed to him on this basis, "like he knows I am interested in the military, and he brings out a war movie to watch with me", he said. This made me laugh, thinking about my father, but in the end, our talk in this segment ended with my son saying, "It's like Grandpa and God are a lot alike. They both love me in the same ways", and despite my own issues with my parents and upbringing, I accepted this as truth, and I am so glad for my son that he has both experienced this kind of love in his life, and accepted it as such.