I was thinking about my mother this morning. Because of her mental and emotional problems, she was often a difficult personality. She was intelligent and musically talented, but her one prominent trait was that she thought the world revolved around her. We did not know at the time that there was a label for that trait–narcissism.
As she aged, my mother’s hearing worsened but she would not get hearing aids. That often caused her to not only not hear what was being said, but to mistake what she heard. She once told me that she threw out all her pork chops because she heard on the radio that eating pork gave you “Amtraks” (anthrax).
But as I thought about her this morning, my favorite story of her old age was the “Saga of the Macaroons.” For some reason, my mother became enthralled with coconut macaroons a few years before she died. They were always part of her grocery order, and she ate them every day, many times a day.
One day she called me in a panic and said that she had gone grocery shopping and there must have been a “run on coconut macaroons” as there were none on the shelves. I asked her if she was sitting in her motorized cart while she shopped, and she said yes. I asked her if she only looked at the shelves at eye level from her cart. She said yes. I asked her if she “looked up” to see them on the upper shelves (where they were usually kept). She said no.
Looking up is extremely important. In Luke 21, Jesus told His disciples about the things that would happen prior to His return. He described signs of the times and then gave a warning. “Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.” [Luke 21:28 NKJV]
My mother missed having her coconut macaroons because she failed to “look up.” We can miss far more if we fail to “look up” from this life and see Jesus.
