A Gift of Love
When I was asked to pen a meditation for The Traveller, my first respond was that I have nothing to offer in this area. However, with the onset of age one frequently thinks of people and events in one’s past that have had a marked influence on a life. I was reminded of such a person in my youth.
I had an aunt whom I knew as the recluse, spinster school teacher who had a crooked finger. She would frequently shake it at me when I had been bad or she wanted to make a point. That finger would certainly assure her ridicule when she wasn’t looking, and frequently my brother and I would make fun of her behind her back.
Every Christmas I would get a small square box that contained a single monogrammed linen handkerchief. The letter on the corner of that handkerchief was never well monogrammed, and, as a young boy, I was usually disappointed that I did not get a better, more expensive gift — something that I really thought I needed more than a single handkerchief with a badly monogrammed letter that I would never use.It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that arthritis had impaired her hands, making her fingers crooked; her ability to sew had been made laborious and painful. Her struggle to monogram a single handkerchief was indeed a time-consuming task of love. Because of her devotion to me, she would painfully strive for weeks to weave the threads through that linen cloth to prepare her seemingly meager gift for her young nephew. How much I missed by looking at the gift rather than the giver, and her labor of love.
We, as God’s children, fail to seek the truth behind the Master’s Gift, Jesus Christ. We look for what He can do for us, rather than what he has already done. We don’t see the true meaning of what that Gift meant to the history of mankind. We don’t even see or appreciate the final chapter of that small Gift’s life.
May our prayer be that we all may ponder God’s Gift, and strive for Him to be a more significant part of our lives. “I pray that the Father of glory may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know Him.” (Ephesians 1:17)
Mary Wydelle Williamson was born in Morton, Mississippi, October 10, 1894. She died in Greenwood, Mississippi on January 21, 1970, at the age of 75.
Wydelle Williamson was a dedicated elementary teacher with great concern for children, even after her mental faculties were impaired due to age.
