Reflections

I don’t know how to start a new post on this space after so long that would contain the clarity, profundity and encouragement to my readers as I’d envisioned at its inception. So, for awhile, I’ve written nothing. My mommy brain gets awfully cluttered and sometimes the blank page on a blog available to who-knows-who around the planet, intimidates me. But my heart gushes and my fingers itch for the keyboard, and Facebook, email or journal just aren’t big enough places to contain myself. So, sometimes the best place to start is in simple, personal reflection. I muse…

A little life flutters with gymnastic movement in my swelling abdomen. Again, I go down this glorious road. My boys ask to “see the baby” and lift up my shirt to touch the stretch marks and feel the kicks, and my darling girl snuggles around it during our nigh-night rock before bed, blissfully ignorant that this intrusive bump will soon transform her from baby to big sister. My fourth child and third son will join our growing tribe and surely already has joined the ranks of souls destined for eternity. For that miracle moment happened at conception, and endures for everlasting – changing the world, and indeed the age to come – forever.

I love that I get to be the vessel that carries these wee ones for this fleeting season of motherhood. My oldest is not yet four, yet I already find my heart grasping to hang on to the sweetness of those bits of time that sail on by before I’ve yet fully appreciated the gift of them. I pray I won’t forget Levi’s proud grin when he brings me “bootiful flowers” of dandelion or clover; or Zay-Zay when he carefully balances a tower of blocks and declares, “I’m doin’ a gwate job, Mama”; or the happy clap of my 14 month old’s chubby hands when she successfully stands on her own; or the twinkle in my husband’s eye after the kids have gone down. And yet for for every delightful memory, it seems a thousand others have already gone missing.

Heaven records them on my behalf. Even the ones I wish I could forget.

My four year old seems to know how best to expose Mommy’s weaknesses. Probably because so much of my own firstborn self wrapped up in his little personality. Not only does he bear much resemblance to my outward appearance, but he also inherits many of my inner qualities. Responsible, competitive, enthusiastic, verbal, take-charge, affectionate, determined, thoughtful, and loves a challenge but is hesitant to try something new he’s unsure he can succeed at. My boy. When I go in to kiss and pray for my children at night, it’s him for whom I have the greatest burden. He’s the first arrow of our quiver, the forerunner of the younger who follow watchfully behind, pondering his example and how his parents will respond to each new territory of childhood he trailblazes. And he of all the children (thus far), is also the one that highlights my weaknesses, not my strengths as a parent. My temper, my impatience, my lack of discipline. I know this is no accident. No child ever is.

There are no accidents. It could have been a different cycle, a different combination of egg and sperm, a different story altogether. My husband could have gone to the Air Force and not to the university where he met the young man that led him to the Lord; we could never have met through a chance meeting at the airport; I could have never drawn breath, flaccid and blue on that hospital bed at birth; my grandpa could have died from a blitzkrieg in London in World War II before producing offspring…a million alternatives could have drastically altered the direction of our lives…but they didn’t. God knew us. Before the foundation of the world, He conceived us in His mind and desired us in His heart.

He gave me a husband so profoundly different from me and a son so terribly like me and said “It is good.” He gave me four children in such quick succession that onlookers think I’m crazy and often I think maybe I am, and said “I love you.” He gives me challenges bigger than I think I can handle, then surprises me with Grace. He has shown me how to overcome – not from my strengths, but from my most weakest place.

Motherhood is a weak place. But it is us poor, blessed ones of the earth that are positioned to know and experience the depths heart of the Father in more powerful ways than most. We are quickly ushered down to the lowest place as we bend in service to our children and beg heaven for help to raise babes into warriors. As we care for the “least of these”, we are being fashioned to become “the greatest” in the kingdom to come.

Heaven records each moment surrendered, squandered, and offered as a sacrifice of praise to our King. I’m living a beautiful season of life. Lord, help me to love more!