Writer D

When my youngest woke at 5:45 this morning I brought him into bed to snuggle with my husband and I. It was a beautiful, half-awake, sleepy moment that I savored, like a favorite taste on my tongue. Normally my husband sneaks out of bed at 4:30 every morning. I also have been trying hard to rise in the 5 o’clock hour, before the children, knowing some morning quiet will solve many of my problems. But a decade of sleep to catch up on and chilly spring mornings often still keep me under the covers.

To touch on the full meaning of this morning, I have to begin with last night. Last night my husband and I finished watching a movie about Mother Teresa. I know going into something like that that I am going to be challenged and stirred up about how I am living. Perhaps I even welcome it too much. But this time, as I wrestle with my life, I am seeing the beauty among the thorns.

My heart longs to see Jesus in the poor as Mother Teresa got to, to hear His voice, and love as simply as she did. But I am comforted by His voice this week reminding me that I get to, right here where I am. The precious children and husband He has given me matter just as much to Him as the poor and dying of Calcutta. I get to hold them and pray for them, just as she did.

But I also get to snuggle in bed with them, and this is a joy Mother Teresa never got to know. I wrestle often with the ideal of being completely devoted to Jesus as the nuns. Mostly I feel like being in a family brings out the worst sides of me. The hardest challenge of my life right now, it seems, is to be my true self with my children and husband. It is so much easier to be at our best with everyone else, and shrivel up at home. But God created families, and I have no doubt that His ways are good beyond my understanding.

So today I am choosing to relish the simple moments of intimacy that family creates, while looking for ways to broaden the reach of my love for the poor around me too.

Writer C

The funny thing, is that I read this prompt an hour after I woke up. And in that hour, I had spent reading my Bible and the commentary on Hebrews, and praying. It seems quite obvious that right there, I should have a profound life-lesson to share. Yes, there are life-lessons screaming from Hebrews 11: “faith, faith, faith!” And that’s what I had planned all along to write about this evening. But as my day unfolded, the Lord took me down some unexpected paths (isn’t that like Him?).

I love my mornings. I’m not the kind of morning person who wakes up bright and perky, but almost the opposite, I wake up with the speed of a snail (and looking rather like one, too). The quiet – the still – that’s what I long for. And so that’s what I did this morning. And like other mornings, my son came out before the rest of the family. We snuggled, and he began to speak – at a million miles per minute – about what he wants for breakfast and who can come over for a playdate and can he buy both a walkie-talkie AND a Darth Vader costume with the 50 cents he’d earned yesterday.

All this. In one breath.

It’s sweet; I know in just a few years he won’t want to snuggle me, and his questions will become more complex, or worse, he’ll stop asking questions altogether. I treasure these precious times. But I also have to brace myself, because all of my peace and quiet gets swallowed whole by a tiny six-year-old boy.

Truth is, I’d rather not hear about Star Wars. There are so many things I want to get accomplished: laundry, dishes, crafts, pealing up that one little bit of who-knows-what on the kitchen floor that was spilled (by the looks of it), sometime last week. But thankfully, by God’s grace, the goop sat for another day. Instead of cleaning, we went for a hike. We walked to one of our favorite little waterfalls, and when we sat down to eat a Ziploc full of animal crackers, I witnessed something profound. Something that I had probably witnessed a thousand times prior, but just hadn’t paid attention. My kids just sat. They sat and ate; they sat and read. They sat and stared; and listened. They were fully present there at the waterfall.

Oh my, how many times had I rushed through my day, wanting to get from one thing to the next without taking the time to just sit? To be present? There were more events throughout the day (that I don’t have enough time to write about) where I got to watch my kids not rush; it was beautiful, and convicting to see.

So tomorrow, I will look forward to getting up and sitting in the cool, quiet of the morning. But I will also (by God’s grace) slow down for a minute to watch my kids, to enjoy the tiny socks I’m folding, to feel the warm water over my hands while I’m washing dishes. To put my phone down and see the world around me.  

Writer A

It’s not exactly that I’m afraid of failure. I’m bored by it.

   Not at first. The first few failures are interesting, analytically. I get to figure out why I failed.

   Once I know why I failed, the repetition of failure is drudgery.

   It’s terrible, mind-numbing, boring, obvious drudgery. Something to sludge through until I find the next rung up the ladder and can pull myself up a step. Practice, practice.

   Failure can go on a long time. And even if I believe in the next ladder rung, I’d rather do anything other than sludge through all that failure. I just don’t want to be that bored.

   This morning my three-year-old son sat on the potty where I’d placed him as soon as he got out of bed. He’d stayed dry all night, and I planned to not put any diapers on him today. So I wanted him to start the day right: by going pee in the potty.

   But he sat there, looking cold and forlorn, and didn’t go. And then he asked in a small voice, “please get down now, mommy?”

   I had to decide whether to give him this one little potty training failure. If he got down, he would pee in his pants at the breakfast table. Another little potty training failure.

   And suddenly I realized that potty training my son was going to be a different kind of training for me—a kind of training that I really, really need: I’m going to practice failing.

   Once I understood this, everything relaxed. I felt like God had handed me a homework assignment, with a note: “Here’s what you need to work on. Be patient and smile for every failure. Just keep failing for as long as it takes.”

A couple days ago I was in the car with my family. We were on our way to a friend’s cabin for the weekend, and I was in the passenger seat staring out the window, feeling guilty.

   It was boring guilt. Very, very familiar guilt. From a few frequently recurring sins.

   I wasn’t talking to God about it because I had already figured out, analytically, why I’d failed. I’d figured it out ages ago. I’d solved my sin problem from a theoretical standpoint. The fact that I was still sinning was so unspeakably tiresome. Was analysis good for nothing? What was the point of all my thinking and understanding?

   I felt so heavy with my boring, familiar guilt, and then I realized that I was ignoring God’s forgiveness. God isn’t like me—He is patient. He forgives over and over. He thinks the ladder rung is worth the sludge of all my failures.

My son, someday, will no longer need diapers and no longer make puddles on the floor. But first, he and I need to go through the repetition of lots of little failures. How much easier it is to smile and comfort my son over and over, when I remember that God does the same thing for me with perfect patience and endless forgiveness, and when I remember that this work of potty training is His gift to me.

Writer B

I woke up this morning to the sweet sounds of my toddler babbling in his crib. That’s one of my favorite sounds in the world, because it’s so cute and happy, and it always makes me wonder what he wakes up thinking about. What is he babbling about? Who is he babbling to? Usually he’s holding a stuffed animal, so one can only presume that he’s babbling at it, but what is he telling it? These are among the adorable curiosities of toddlerhood, whose answers we adults may never be privy to.

I love walking into his room and seeing his cheerful attention turned towards me, hearing his delighted laughter as he stands up in his cute little jammies, ready to be plucked out of his bed and carried out into the world to start the day. Usually he only grabs his blankie as he departs his crib, but on some mornings, he decides, for no apparent reason, that he must bring every single one of his stuffed animals with him. This adds up to quite a few animals because, for further inexplicable reasons, he keeps adding to the number he insists on taking to bed with him. (Maybe that’s not so inexplicable. I’m pretty sure I did the same thing as a kid. Genetics, friends.)

Anyway, this morning was one of those mornings. The delighted laughter quickly gave way to visible anxiety that we were maybe going to leave some animals behind, and he plopped back down in the crib and began grabbing every single one and chucking them over the railing onto the floor, and he then tried to chuck his own self over the railing to get at them. I rescued him from that disaster-waiting-to-happen, and then he bent over and tried to scoop all of the animals into his short, stubby arms. Sloths, bears, rabbits, blankies, they were a force to be reckoned with, and more than he could manage. So with a sigh, I scooped up the majority of them, and he followed me out of his room with the rest.

The unfortunate thing is, because both his arms and mine were full of stuffed animals, I wasn’t cuddling him, as I usually do. So in his sudden desire to have ALL THE ANIMALS, he missed out on snuggle time with me.

We deposited the animals on the floor of the play room, where they proceeded to remain for the duration of the day, serving no purpose except to trip us up as we walked in and out of the room.

Like my flesh trips me up as I try to follow the Lord.

How many mornings does God invite me into His presence, and I smile with gladness, and then go on  to say “Hang on, I need to bring all of this with me”? And then I waste time grabbing my pride and my self-awareness, my phone and my social media, my makeup and my image, my clothes and my materialism. I grab all the things I think I want, and I miss out on true intimacy with my heavenly Father, and the things I bring along do nothing but hinder me in my walk with Him.

Do I think my toddler was sinning when he wanted all those animals? 100% no. It was adorable, and sweet, and ridiculous, and one of the reasons I love him so much. But it would NOT be cute if I behaved this way, and oh my goodness, I am appalled out how very like a toddler I can be.

When I get my little boy in the morning, I have a relatively clear picture of what the next five minutes will look like, and the next hour, and the next 24 hours. He only knows what RIGHT NOW looks like, and RIGHT NOW he sometimes wants all of his animals. I pray that God will help me see past RIGHT NOW and give me the grace to leave my little comforts behind, for the greater and richer comfort of His presence.

This was our prompt:

Write about a life lesson that could be learned from something that happened within the first hour that you were awake today. – 25 minute challenge