From Here Comes the Glory

A short vignette, published in the HMPC Lent Devotional Guide, based on the provided verse.

Psalm 24:10

    Who is this King of glory?
    The Lord of hosts,
    he is the King of glory

When Michael was 3, he learned the words to "The Lord’s Prayer" by watching my dad sing it on our wedding video. At the time, it was his favorite movie.

That may seem a little odd, but it was the only place he had ever met or seen my late mom, who passed away before he was born. Besides the picture of her he still keeps in his room, watching the few snippets of her at our wedding and reception was his sole connection to someone he knew of, but never had the chance to know.

Almost without knowing it, he also absorbed the words to the prayer, and he loved belting out the ending… “and the power…and the glory…forever… Amen.”

One day, on our way to visit my dad in the western part of the state, we drove on a bridge at Jordan Lake, gazing at a red-orange sunset over the cooling tower at the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant.

“You see that big building over there?” we told him. “That’s where we get all of our power.”

After thinking for a second, he asked the obvious question: “So where do we get the glory?”       

We laughed as soon as he said it, but the answer was all around us: in the loveliness of a cloud-filtered setting sun, in the joy of a precocious child, in the sweet family memories passed down to a new generation and in the given grace that we don’t deserve.

Every day, with every simple thing, we celebrate all that we receive from God, the King of Glory.