A Magic Elixir

activated by hugs

They say when a child hugs you, don’t be the first to let go.

That’s what I was thinking when our son Theo poked his head out this morning and asked if he could get up and play yet.

I’d been all wrapped up in a king-sized blanket on the deck, reading the Psalms aloud in slow, deliberate sentences:

Did I understand them? Pause.

Feel them? Pause.

BELIEVE them? Pause.

I was feasting on a delicious clarity there in my gut—the kind I sometimes find when me and the Holy Spirit and our backyard jungle of maples are all sharing one verdant, synchronized breath—when I heard the slider open.

Even without looking I knew it was him, knew what he wanted to ask. But I swiveled in my chair anyway, saw him standing there with his bare chest and gangly legs and shining, well-rested eyes. I usually would have sent him back to his room, back to wait until his nightlight turned green because that’s the rule, back so that I could have more time alone with this rare-delectable-full-bodied sensation of peace.

But then I said, “Theo, wait,” instead, and he ran to me; he knew what I was wanting because he wanted it too. He shouldered his way under my arms, and we held each other for at least a minute, or maybe even two—him squeezing his toy crocodile beneath his elbow while twirling a strand of my hair, and me rubbing his back and letting my chin rest in the crook of his neck.

A couple of times I almost pulled away to pat him on the head and send him off to play, but I remembered that advice to keep hugging a child just as long as they darn-well please and so we stayed like that for moment after moment after moment. I marveled that he would want to be held by his mom so long long—now, at this busy-important-ripe-old-age of five.

I felt he needed some silent assurance from me and I hope I was transmitting it. I began to pray from that ancient place in my bones that loves because it remembers Eden, remembers a world beyond dust and gravel and death:

Let the love and peace I’m experiencing now go into him, the ancient place murmured.

Let him feel it in this single perfect moment, and then carry it with him through his whole life like a protective balm

like an elixir that brings him back always to an Earth and an order of things the way God made it first, before sin…

before sin.

He finally let go; he had important business to finish on a MagnaTile tower in his room. “Mumma,” he said—almost dreamily, almost to himself—as he wandered back inside.

Afterward, I felt oxytocin, that happy love chemical, flaring all throughout my body and I had a single, stunning thought: This is the elixir!

I have heard it said that oxytocin is the antidote to trauma, that it can literally erase the otherwise permanent effects of adverse experiences in our lives. It enters into the marrow of the dark-ugly brokenness that lives around and inside of us and, like a magic potion, restores what’s become all twisted and destroyed.

Yes, God has put a naturally-occurring antidote directly into our bodies that can restore what has been ravaged by sin. And the magical stuff is activated by love. The whole concept gives an entirely new meaning to the words, “Love covers a multitude of sins.”¹

Today, I am drawn by how the physical world and even the chemicals in our bodies whisper of redemption—of how we are all being called back to wholeness. Though we groan from worn-thin spirits, assaulted by the adverse effects of Eden, lost, God has slipped a protective balm into our innermost systems. Our very design confirms that Love is in the business of redemption, and that Love will always, always have the final say.

Note to self: Give a whole lot more hugs.

1. 1 Peter 4