I certainly have felt, over the past year or so, a dawning awareness of how very little I understood what I was signing up for at the altar when I promised to accept children willingly, and to raise them to know and love God.
I foresaw back then that, with the help of the handy! easy! beautiful! effortless! tool of NFP, I’d be smugly spacing those children 2-3 years apart, maaaaaaaybe have 4 of them total, and they’d all be fluent in baby sign language and eating hand-cranked organic purees prepared by their thin and attentive mother.
Also, we’d go on lots of nice vacations.
(Well, we have gone on nice vacations.)
But I’ve never been called thin, at least to my face, and the babies have come closer than I could have anticipated; this morning my fourth born chugged a packet of Similac on-the-go mixed directly with frigid water from the IKEA soda fountain, chased with a torn off hunk of chicken strip and a pinch of somebody’s brownie. Also, nobody speaks anything other than English or has anything resembling nocturnal bladder control. #we’renumber1
But my life is rich. It’s rich in moments to give and receive mercy. It’s embarrassingly wealthy in service opportunities. (Like, for real, my 17 year old self would have been all over the college application padding potential.)
And it’s filled to the bursting-wineskins-point with moments to choose between Thy will and my will.
I suspect that, until the day I die or the moment I gain some semblance of sanctity, that will continue to be the case, and the opportunities to surrender will keep rolling in.
Sometimes wearing diapers.
Or sometimes wearing the bitter disappointment of another month of hearing “no.” Or of a painful diagnosis. A ridiculous spousal miscommunication. A gut wrenching betrayal. A loss. A hardship.
I guess this is what it means to live with one eye on Heaven and one on the daily grind. It’s not some kind of weird hybrid reality where things get easier because I’m trying to exercise virtue, but a real participation in the life of Christ. Which was and is all about self gift and loved poured out. And pain. Not pain for the sake of suffering, but for the sake of love.
I can suffer that. But it’s still going to hurt.
(Also, I’m going to forget I said or thought any of this within 4 days, guaranteed. Onward and upward.)
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This post originally appeared at Mama Needs Coffee, published with permission.
