Homemade Hope

A few hours after my last post, our family and another gathered in the living room of a home in the Berkshires to celebrate New Year's Eve.

After a day outdoors, it was good for the youngest and heartiest to stay home.  I'd  spent the day inside, by a warming fire, reflecting on a year gone by.

While parents prepared dinner, the children rehearsed for the evening's entertainment, a talent show.   All would participate, adults and children.

As a Baptist preacher's kid, my experience with New Year's Eve services was potlucks, testimonies and prolonged prayer. We called them Watch Night Services.

As I watched this evening's preparations I prepared for Broadway, not the Baptist way.

But God doesn't like boxes and showed up for Mexican food, all talents, then touched out hearts when, 5 year old Nadia stepped forward and sang all the verses of Louis Armstrong's classic, What a Wonderful World.

I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and you and I think to myself what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night and I think to myself what a wonderful world.

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going by, I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do, they're really saying, I LOVE YOU.

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow, they'll learn much more than I'll never know and I think to myself what a wonderful world.

Yes, I think to myself what a wonderful world.

Thank you, sweet Nadia, for singing us into the New Year with a reminder, truer than the nightly news.

It's a wonderful world.

Thank you for some homemade hope.