Moving Upward Together: Day 19

 

Day 19, The Spire – Dale Weir 

When I was a tiny baby, my father was assigned to Morocco. Several months after he departed, my mother loaded up my two older sisters and myself, and we traveled by ocean liner with other military families to join him. Several years later, with a new baby along, Dad’s tour of duty was over, and it was time to return to the states. But, wanting to see as much of the world as they could first, and, not certain they would ever make it back, my parents loaded themselves and four little girls into a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and proceeded to zig zag across Europe for a month during a heatwave, eventually reaching England and an ocean liner headed home. We saw wondrous things along the way. We discovered areas like the Leaning Tower of Pisa that were so conservative that my mother, in a sleeveless dress with “bare armpits”, wasn’t allowed to enter. 

But one enduring legacy of that trip was my mother recognizing that every church spire in Europe was slightly different. For the rest of her life, during family road trips, she would point to church spires and tell us that if we studied them, we could never get lost; each unique spire would tell us where we were and each spire in the distance would tell us where we were going. 

I have looked at the St Mark spire over the years. I’ve seen birds perched on it watching over a parking lot concert during Covid. I’ve witnessed the heavens giving off once in a lifetime light shows around it. I have seen it with a covering of snow, and baking in the heat of hot sunny days. At one point, I was asked to take a picture of it for something the church office needed (maybe the cover to a directory? ), but I wasn’t able to do it justice, so I recommended that they contact Richard Hunt, as I knew he would be able to take a picture that would be far better than anything I could take. Just as seeing the Arch, lets my heart know I’m back in St Louis, seeing the St Mark Spire, lets me know I’m home.

“Welcoming God, you send us out into the world with a mission, but you also call us back home to rest. We thank you for the many guideposts you place in our lives directing us to your love and your eternal presence. Give us eyes to see and feet to move knowing you are leading us home. Amen.”