Rock on!

This super-size rocker has been a longtime

fixture outside a furniture store in Moscow, Idaho

I’m a big fan of rocking chairs—well, maybe not this big. But the soothing action of rockers takes me back to my childhood and sitting in the lap of my dad for story time in his spring-action platform rocker. When I started my first job three hours’ drive from home, and needed to assemble furniture basics, I could hardly wait to buy my own rocker.  My bed was third-hand. My ancient hand-me-down couch had wires poking through the frame. My passed-on dining set was, well, plastic and cheap. But in that first year I added a colonial style wooden rocker to my household.  When things got tough at work or in relationships, it was my “place to go” to read scripture and talk with my Heavenly Father.

More than a decade later, when I married and had babies, that rocker was moved to the nursery. Motherhood gave me a special appreciation for Psalm 131:

My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty;

I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.

But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, both now and forevermore.

When my two older grandsons visit and take their naps at our home, the three-year-old still likes Nana to rock him. I ask what he wants me to sing, and it’s always “Mary had a little lamb.”  I follow up with “Jesus loves me” and some other Sunday school songs until he’s mellow enough to place in the portable playpen where he takes naps here. (His brother rates the crib in the guest room.)  As I cover him and whisper, “Nana loves you,” I’m taken back to those stretching times of trust when, quiet before God in my earthly rocker, I sought the spiritual strength to keep my hope in Him. When things in my life were going haywire, I wanted to be still and quiet before Him.

My mother died in 1978 when I was barely thirty, so memories of her are becoming more precious. One memory, captured by camera in an era when photos were rare and expensive, shows her as a newborn in 1919, propped up in an old rocker. I knew she was born in a log cabin in eastern Montana, the firstborn of a Norwegian immigrant and his wife, whose childhood polio left her with one leg shorter than the other. The family lived in poverty, tilling the land he'd homesteaded. I don’t know the story of that old rocker. Because my grandfather (who died when I was a few months old) had trained in carpentry in Norway, it’s possible he even crafted it.

I realize rockers have no inherent spiritual quality. But when I sit in my current favorite rocker, my heart waiting for the whispers of my Heavenly Father, I know He is there for me. I am stilled and quieted before Him, listening, and learning.