God's Bottle

None of my children look like me. Not one in five. I know that I gave birth to them and can tell you, in great detail, about each of those experiences. Don’t worry, I won’t.
I can even tell you about each pregnancy and the fact that I’m still carrying around more than a little weight from those times. Some women might resent the fact that their bodies are not quite the same after childbearing. Don’t worry, I don’t.
My three oldest daughters accentuate the physical differences between us by dying their hair darker than the natural color. I forget how different we look until someone asks, “Where did they get their beautiful dark hair?”
Rarely at a loss for words, I answer, “From a bottle.” What I leave out is that my hair color also comes from a bottle. If I cannot look like I did in college, at least I can rely on chemistry to keep my hair the same color as it once was.
When Lauren darkened her hair last fall, I looked at her and thought, with that long, dark hair, I’d love to see her in a red formal. It wasn’t a prayer, or even a deep desire, just a thought that I soon dismissed. Ten months later, as I was sewing a long, red dress for her to wear at a banquet in Washington, D.C., I remembered that thought and thanked God for never forgetting it. He provides for my needs, hears my prayers, and sometimes even surprises me by fulfilling a wish.
Are all of my wishes fulfilled? No. I don’t have a room that can hold my extended family or a lazy river in the backyard. That’s okay. It’s just proof that some of my husband’s wishes are fulfilled.
Neither are all of my prayers answered the way that I want them to be. And that’s okay, too. I have chosen to trust that God know what’s best, and I rely on His comfort rather than question His decisions.
One Scripture that never fails to comfort me is Psalm 56:8, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” God never forgets my prayers, dreams, or even my tears. Somewhere in Heaven is a bottle that holds each one of them.
And that bottle’s much bigger than the one that holds my hair color.