Coming to you cordless

When cordless phones first came out, my brother had a joke. Whenever he would call he would say "Coming to you cordless". He got it from some cheesy character in a movie I can't remember.

Boy have things changed! Now I can sit at my dining room table, or in the yard, if the weather is good, and actually read my email and surf the 'net. We are wired for wireless. I can even save a file to my laptop and access it from my desktop. What a world.

Cords are interesting. They connect things. When my babies were inside me, living off the oxygen and nutrients from my blood, they were connected by a cord that contained 1 vein, 2 arteries and a lot of wharton's jelly. In the old days, when kid was born, the doctor (and it was always a doctor, LOL) cut the cord first thing. They believed, erroneously, that early cord cutting would prevent bilirubin build-up, which caused jaundice. When my kids were born, though, the midwife knew that almost a third of their blood was still in the placenta, so she let the cord finish pulsating before she cut. The miracle is that the vein closes first, as soon as the baby is born, so that their blood cannot pass back to me. It is, from that moment, a one way street. Physiologically, that little infant is no longer sending anything back to mom... but emotionally it is a totally different story. We suck up their presence like drug, after a long, arduous journey through labor. They are our precious reward.

How does the cord with God work? Do we just take and take and take from him? Is it possible that even though we can offer him nothing at all in return, our mere presence, our love, our very dependence, is a joyful gift? I pray that is true, because at the end of the day, it is really all I can offer.