Do it again!

Do it again!

At a memorable Montreat preaching conference some 25 years ago, the esteemed scholar Richard Lischer likened God’s singular pleasure at causing the sun to rise in the same way every day to a child’s utter delight at hearing the same book read over and over.

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“Do it again!” sounds the familiar refrain at both the daily miracle of God’s sunrise and the repeated recitation of a beloved classic.

“Do it again” is a request I’ve heard rather often since becoming a grandmother to Elijah a year and a half ago.

As he and I thumb together impatiently through the well-worn pages of the still sturdy board book “The Very Busy Spider” by Eric Carle, Elijah pauses at the pig to point and giggle.

But these days as Elijah begins to better understand and appreciate the people and creatures that surround him, I have been trying to teach him something more about what makes the pig so remarkable beyond the unparalleled wisdom that Carle offers to the youngest of readers.

Pigs, I tell him, love, follow and honor their mothers above all. For pigs, who live in matriarchal social structures, the female of the species is responsible for the care, nurture and safety of the entire family.

And so it is in many parts of our world, too, that women are the primary providers for their families.

It’s a reality that I’ll acknowledge this year by making a gift through the Presbyterian Giving Catalog to commemorate Mother’s Day on Sunday  in honor of the unbreakable bond between mother and child — and grandmother and grandchild.

Whenever a donor decides to give a Catalog gift like Jerry Cans, Latrines, Health for Mothers and Newborns, or even a Piglet, they will be making a choice to honor a special parental figure by helping to create lasting, positive change around the world.

To that, I can only say, “Do it again!”