Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns
If you think Jesus would have come into your home that day and not issued a strong rebuke to the head of household, you are mistaken. These words of condemnation have been haunting me for days now. They aren’t all that different than the soundtrack I play in my head on an almost-daily basis. It’s…
I am nesting. On Saturday I emptied the refrigerator. Last summer’s homemade pickles in their jars. The bread ends that seem to multiply on every shelf. The eggs. The milk. The fruit and veggies. All of it sat on the floor or the counter as I carefully removed the shelves and wiped them down with…
I’ve heard that life is like a highway. And it definitely seems like that sometimes. The pace of life swirls around me at dizzying speeds. We’re all so busy. In such a hurry. Always somewhere to be, something else to do. I’m a get-to-the-point, get-there-quick kind of girl. I don’t like to waste time on…
I’ve been away too long. Is this really what the calendar says?
When the New Year begins, I always think life is going to move slow. January has 31 days, after all, and we all know that 31 days in January is longer than 31 days in just about any other month. Especially August. August could have a hundred and 31 days and still not be enough. I hate to see summer end, even when I can’t stand the high temperatures. Or May. I’d take twice as many days in May as what the calendar gives us.
But now it’s February. The shortest month. The one that always seems to drag.
Our cluster of four doesn’t have any family milestones in January, and with the seminary semester picking up speed, I feel like I blinked and missed much of what happened to us this month. So, for posterity, and to shake the winter blahs, here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to.
We’ll start with the little guy, who’s not so little anymore. 14 months old and he runs this joint. At least, that’s what he thinks. Walkin’, talkin’, destroyin’, makin’ noise. I’d like to say he’s ALL boy, but then he goes and does something like this.
Phil assures me it’s fine. But what does he know? He likes to wear pink.
When he’s not showing off his bling, Corban likes to color. Well, he holds the crayon and sweeps it across anything in his path. If a coloring book happens to be within reach, then we call it coloring. Otherwise, it’s a “No, Corban” moment. We have a lot of those.
His favorite food these days varies from “nana” — a banana, which he would eat at every meal if he could. He looks straight at them, grins as wide as his face and shouts “nana” at the top of his lungs. His grandma is also called “Nana,” but unless she decides to wear bananas on her head like the Chiquita banana lady, she might have to change her name — to “crackie,” which is NOT any kind of illegal substance unless there’s something I don’t know about Wheat Thins, Honey Maid and Kashi TLC products. Jesus said man cannot live on bread alone, but I’m pretty sure Corban could live on crackers alone.
Then, we have the drama queen. 
She’s going on 3, but some days I’d swear she’s going on 13. She flips her hair across her shoulders. She wants to “get holes in my ears.” (Mom is not on board for this yet.) She says she wants something then immediately follows that statement with “but I don’t.”
Example:
Mom: What do you want for a snack? Apple? Cheese and crackers? Yogurt?
Isabelle: Apple!
Mom pulls apple out of fridge as Isabelle yells, “I don’t want an apple!”
Sigh. Parents whose children are older than mine tell me it gets worse after this. I. can’t. wait. (Insert sarcasm if you can’t read into that statement.) I cling to the hope of kindergarten. I once thought we would homeschool our children, but now I know better. Someone would end the day in tears and it would probably be me.
Isabelle would go to kindergarten tomorrow if we would let her. She’s sad when the yellow bus speeds by our house without stopping to pick her up. Lately, she’s been really interested in letters, the ABC’s, and wanting to write them. She’s in love with “Chutes and Ladders.” (See previous post here.) And puzzles. I don’t mean to brag, but she can put 8 pieces of a 24-piece Spongebob puzzle together without much help from me. It’s for 3-7 year olds. She’s brilliant, right? (When you read that, think humor, not stuck-up. Please?)
What about this guy?
He’s the cheese to my macaroni. The colored marshmallows to my frosted oats. The fizz in my soda.
In other words, he makes life interesting. He taught Isabelle to play hide-and-seek recently, and she loves it. Except that she doesn’t exactly get the concept of hiding. If Phil walks through the house wondering, “Where is Isabelle?” she’ll giggle and come out of hiding saying, “Here I am!” But she loves to count and then find him hiding wherever he might be. Our house is small. We may have exhausted our hiding spots, but to Isabelle the game is not old yet. He’s a good daddy.
He’s in the second half of his third year of four for seminary. Which makes him somewhere in the neighborhood of five-eighths of the way to graduation. (Somebody get a calculator and check my math.) He’s also in training to win a weight-loss competition at work. Grand prize is $100. It’s like a mini-“Biggest Loser.” First weigh-in after the initial weigh-in is tomorrow. Hope he’s on the right track!
Then, there’s me.
Yep. There I am. Honestly, in front of a computer is where I’m usually the happiest, but I’m learning to give it its time and walk away. For the children. For my family. For myself.
I’ve been blessed with a couple of opportunities to expand my writing horizons, so I am. And that’s one reason you haven’t seen much on this blog lately. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but I’d like to think someone out there missed me! (OK, enough self-pity and searching for significance!)
I wish I had something profound to tell you tonight, but mostly I just wish you could experience the joy of our house, even in times of trouble. This is as close as I can get you. We can’t bring you to our house, so I’ve tried to bring our house to you.
Winter’s half over. Soon I’ll look back on February and wonder where the time went.
Until then, I hope to keep in better touch.
It’s the winter of my discontent. Poetic language is sometimes lost on me, so I’ve always thought there’s something about winter that makes a person discontented. For some reason, I dwell on all the things I want or don’t have more in the cold, snowy, dreary months of winter.
This winter, my discontent includes:
And those are just the things that come to mind immediately. I know I’ve dwelt on other areas recently. Earlier this week, I was convinced I was not cut out for motherhood and God had no use for me in His kingdom. The reason? I’ve spent the better part of the last week battling illness (in myself) and wiping the children’s noses. This latter activity brings me no fulfillment whatsoever. So, I began to wonder, what use I could possibly be to the kingdom of God while wiping noses every couple of minutes. My heart longs for greater things; my mind has dreams of glory.
Somewhere inside me, I know that motherhood is a blessed gift, the HIGHEST calling maybe, but in this instant-gratification, microwave dinner world, the payoff of parenting is like slow roasting a turkey. I feel like I have to wait years before I’ll see any reward from this gig. I used to work in newspapers. The results of my labors were daily. Motherhood seems to be the same thing, day in, day out.
That’s not exactly fair. Our days are not boring by any means, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who experiences the madness, and what good is that to anyone else?
The apostle Paul said he had learned the secret of being content, and people usually follow that with his statement, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” So Christ is the secret to contentment, but how does that live itself out in my world? I know I ought to be content, but I’m not really sure how to get there. When I find myself wanting to be content, I discover something else with which I’m discontented.
And I’m a little afraid I’m going to spend my whole life like this — wanting what I can’t have or don’t have, wishing for another season of life, wondering why I’m not OK with life as it is instead of longing for life as I wish it was.
What are your secrets to contentment? How do you live with your life as it is while still hoping for better things to come?
Yesterday, three auction trucks pulled up in front of the house across the street. Our neighbor had been sick for a few weeks then was moved to an assisted living facility. Her family, it seems, had been through the house. What was left was left to the auction company to haul away.
Two trucks of stuff. One truck of garbage. A person’s whole life, as it were, all her possessions, gone in a day. Someone else determined what was important enough to keep, what could be sold and what should be thrown away.
Watching the process was sad, in a way, even though I didn’t know our neighbor at all. But it reminded me how quickly life passes, how easily “stuff” comes into our life and leaves it.
I’m trying to start this process myself in our house. One of my areas of discontentment is the size of our house compared to the amount of “stuff” we have. It’s not the house, really, that’s the problem; it’s our accumulation of things. I’ve begun boxing up things we aren’t using right now. I’ve started a give away bag. I’ve bagged up newspapers and magazines to recycle.
I’m not convinced it will solve my discontentment, but it’s a start.
When Shakespeare wrote the “winter of discontent” line, he meant that discontent was dying. I get it now. And I’m hoping that this really is the winter of my discontent.