Cherry On Top

Lately it seems my daughter Emily is growing up at an exponential rate. Seems just not too long ago we were having tea parties in her room. No, I didn’t have to dress up. But poor Teddy-teddy and the others did. I remember playing a Winnie-the-Pooh game similar to musical chairs.

Emily and her friend Lexi @ Keith Urban concert.
It was Emily's 16th birthday.

I can’t mention here all of the ways she makes me proud. It’s a thousand ways every day. My son Ethan too…but that’s a different subject for a different day.

Nowadays she’s all about studying, friends, and lately, dances.Dances. Yeah. High school homecoming in particular.

I am oblivious to the weeks of preparation, ordering, shopping, etc required until a some crisis comes along. Take women’s shoes for example. Now, I’m not real proud of this but I seem to have had the knack for finding the right women’s shoe for this occasion.

At home, I sort of sit by like a piece of furniture trying to stay out of the way while she and Linda are searching on-line for the perfect dress. I watch as stress-levels max out when it hasn’t arrived the day of the dance - discover it’s lost in shipping. They rush out to buy a replacement and arrive home to find the original in the mailbox while they were out. The Crisis shifts from “What am I going to wear?” to Which ONE am I going to wear?”

Homecoming 2012 - the gratuitous
photo with dad

But the joy I get out of this is waiting in my chair in the living room when she emerges from her bedroom. It really leaves me breathless is that my little girl is so stunningly beautiful. God is changing her before our very eyes.

The other joy I had was picking her up afterward. Don’t get me wrong, it was full of similar stresses as preparing for the dance such as “Post-dance parental pick-up traffic” and “finding each other in the parking lot by cell phone”.

We didn’t say much. But I relished the 10-minutes just riding in the car with her all decked out in her new dress, hair, make-up, shoes and all.

So, I’ve been thinking. Recently I started reading the One-Year Bible. I’m just getting started so you can as you can guess I’m reading a lot of the Book of Genesis. In reading the creation story I came to the part about God creating Eve.

As I read I got the idea that God’s creation is sort of like an ice cream sundae. You take an empty bowl (a void) and you fill it up with all kinds of good stuff! Scoops of different flavors of ice cream, top it with chocolate, butterscotch, caramel, fruit and nuts (Ok, you can skip the nuts if you like) then whipped cream, and on the pinnacle of the sumptuous heap of ice cream….a …bright…shining…cherry.

Like an epic symphony building, building, BUILDING until the crash of the final….wait scratch that...the final “TING”…of the triangle. The perfect endnote.

So this is what Eve is like; the cherry on top; the final “ting” at the end of the symphony.

This is what I hope us guys remember; us men, boys, boyfriends, dads, husbands, brothers, sons. Let’s all remember that they; women, girls, girlfriends, moms, wives, and sisters are the final note in the masterpiece, the crescendo of all that is good..

I hope I can remember always that the women in my life represent the pinnacle of creation and that I can treat them as such.

The cherry on top.