Loved on the Hour

As I write this the street is quiet. Snow falls silently. The wind is not even a whisper. The house is cold and quiet. The heat pipes are not knocking. The only perceptible sounds are the tap of these keys and the tick of an old cuckoo clock. Back and forth, back and forth, thousands of times a day a wooden oak leaf marks the passing seconds.


Last summer we cleaned the garage and discovered boxes that came up the Alcan Highway to Alaska with us many years ago but remained unopened. In one of them was a beautiful clock. My heart pounded as I lifted it out of the newspaper protecting it for two decades. (It went from Dallas to Amarillo unwrapped before beginning the journey north.) This clock has history.

A new bride and her horn player husband had just arrived in their military home of Nuremberg, Germany with wedding money in their pockets. Thrilled with eachother and Europe they went exploring in the cold German winter.

They bought black bread and cheesecake at the bakery, sausage at the butcher and then they found the clocks. Clocks everywhere in so many different styles. Clocks with birds, with deer, with carved horns and leaves, with alpine scenes, with dancers, with cuckoos and chimes and playing the Emperor waltz. One had most all of the above and the wedding money flew out of their pockets as fast as the cuckoo announcing the noon hour.

That clock graced the wall of our first home together almost forty years ago. Now it again ticks by the seconds and hours of young love ripened into something really wonderful.

There was a season the clock was hidden, forgotten. When rediscovered we needed the help of a European watchmaker to restart it. You know me, there is a story in everything, Jesus in all things. I thought of how constant Christ's love for us is. How unfailing, dependable, timely. I considered how His intervention in our lives is like the watchmaker whose patient, skilled hands brought the silent pendulum back to life.

Constancy: The quality of being faithful and dependable.
The quality of being enduring and unchanging.
Freedom from variation. Steadfastness of mind.

How precious to love and serve a God whose affection for us is a set mark. Established forever, unchangeable. Nothing can uproot it or wash it away. It cannot be lost, broken or tarnished. It keeps time forever. "Loved. Loved. Loved. Loved." Hear it. Feel it. Know it for the truth.

I'm absolutely convinced that nothing, nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us. Romans 8:37

Because of the way Jesus has embraced us.

So here I sit listening to a cuckoo clock announce another hour in my life in Christ where I am loved, and the "emperor" of my married life is awake now and waltzing toward me from the bedroom in flannel pjs with reindeer on them.

Faithful, dependable, enduring and unchangeable.

Should love ever be anything less?

In this grateful season my heart and my cup overflow with it.

May Christ restart all of our silent clocks in need of His special care.

May they chime all the hours of our lives until His Kingdom comes.

k

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, nor turning shadow. James 1:17
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Dedicated to Casey and Adam on the occasion of their 1st anniversary. Blessings and many more to come.