We've reached the wee hours of the morning and still we are up, Manly and I – he working on taxes and I keeping him company, huddled close to an outlet holding my charging iPad, reading “One Thousand Gifts.” It is my second time through it, but it has been a year since I read it and I have forgotten much.
I am realizing that I have been living like a Martha yet again. Busy, busy, busy – much too busy to take time to stop and sit at the feet of Jesus. All week long I scurried to get ready for the weekend and Friday night came and the children came down with colds and all night long was a duet of alternating wails – first one, then the other. I didn't get to sleep until 4:30 and then it was time to get up again at 9:00. And I was grumpy. I had a pleasant interlude when I managed to pull off a pan of perfect scrambled eggs and they didn't even stick to my stainless Belgique. But I was still grumpy. And it showed more and more until I melted into tears when Piper's nap ended all too quickly and I realized I wasn't going to get to nap while she did. My sweet husband commanded me to go to sleep and he would take care of her.
It was not a glorious night of parenthood, Friday night. Those nights happen.
I do not subscribe to the view that parenting is mostly chronos moments interspersed with rare moments of kairos. But neither do I think that it is only pure ecstasy. There are moments...sometimes even hours...that you wonder if you are going to survive. Last night I wondered, as I dragged myself back to re-insert a pacifier for Piper or peeked in to make sure that Rosie was only wailing in feverish sleep and not in real trouble of some kind, my head splitting with yawning and my eyes struggling to focus from sheer exhaustion.
I felt dry, depleted, and uncertain that I could possibly give any more of myself.
And then I realized, much later than I should have, that I should pray for a better attitude. So I did. And it came to me, groggily, that tonight was Good Friday. That just the night before this, 2000 years ago, Christ had asked His disciples, “Can you not watch with me one hour?” I had just read the passage earlier that day, as I sat in an Indian restaurant waiting for take-out. “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation.”
It didn't really sink in last night. But I felt convicted enough by the thought that Christ had been up all night alone, deserted by sleeping disciples, praying fervently, sweating blood – and then, without sleep, dragged away to be crucified – and He never once complained about it.
And here I was, up all night because I was watching over two sniffly but otherwise healthy, living children, and wailing about my hard, hard life.
I was silenced for the time.
But today I forgot again, when I still felt groggy and bleary-eyed and aching with exhaustion, and naptime wasn't going well. I forgot. I was grouchy. I was unthankful. All I wanted was sleep. It is important stuff, sleep. But I wanted it so desperately that I forgot Who I should be wanting even more.
Reading “One Thousand Gifts” tonight, I highlighted frantically as every line in Chapter 6 seemed to be aimed right at me. And I was struck by the line, “Looking is the evidence of believing.”
And I paused and wondered when I had last looked for things to give thanks for. Why had I not stopped in the chaos of last night and given thanks for it? Christ was giving thanks in the Garden of Gethsemane. Could I not have given thanks in the sleeplessness of sniffly little noses and feverish little brows?
I looked across the room and noted my gratitude journal, buried under a pile of papers. Sure evidence that I had not been looking.
No, I had spent all week forgetting to look. I did not stand with eyes wide open and weigh down each moment with me all here, and I did not remember to look for God in everything. My days revolved around whipping the house into shape – running, running, running, working, working, working, and I was very productive from Martha Stewart's perspective but I had not done so well from the perspective of Mary of Bethany. I had not paused to look for Christ all week. And if I am not looking for Him, should I wonder when my little ones do not look for Him? When I spoke of His death and resurrection to Rosie, she looked at me a bit blankly and wanted to talk about Kipper the dog instead.
If she does not see me living and breathing a relationship with Him, looking at everything as from His hand and looking, looking, constantly looking for Christ in everything – how is she to learn to want Him, either?
I know that I must want Him more. I must stop starving my soul by obsessing about weight loss to the detriment of spiritual weight gain. I must stop revolving my day around my physical workout if it is to the detriment of my own spiritual muscles. I must step back from frantically organizing my house if it means my soul is falling into shambles, and I must walk away from passionate cleaning if my heart is left gathering cobwebs.
I don't want my children to remember a house that was spotless and a kitchen that never had a dirty dish in it for more than 1.2 seconds or floors that shone if that means they will remember a mother who was spotted dirty with impatience and selfishness and irritability.
Perhaps instead of viewing my children as inconveniences to be managed I need to remember that they are souls given to me – me, unworthy – to water and nurture and grow. And a soul can starve while being fed gourmet, gluten-free dinners and living in a perfectly-organized, spotless house – and a soul can be well fed in a home where Mommy leaves the dishes in the sink to stop and point out the window at a bird to tell children of the Creator, or in a home where cobwebs hang from ceiling fans but Mommy is hard at work sweeping cobwebs out of hearts with prayer and thanksgiving and this wild, relentless hunt for Christ's joy.
Of course, so much better to have a clean house and a clean heart. But I speak of my own obsession with one to the neglect of the other. I spent the week frantically preparing the house for the weekend, and working out and eating the correct number of points for the day, and then with the weekend came A Test and I discovered that I had been exercising the wrong muscles all week long and the weight of that Test was crushing me. I was not ready for the weekend, after all.
That night was not pleasant. Sleeplessness is not a blessing in itself. And yet...what if, instead, I had been “all eye,” as Ann Voskamp said in the chapter I read tonight, like the cherubim who have eyes on their heads, hands, feet, and wings? If, instead of looking selfishly at the inconvenience of it all, I had looked for the place of learning? If I had paused and looked for God in the sleeplessness? But I did not look. My eyes were closed and I lived last night in a spotless house with unbelief in my heart. I had prepared materially for the weekend and left my soul starved, and when the weekend came, I was not ready.
Oh, my husband read Scripture to me all week long. I listened. But as soon as it was over I jumped into my to-do list and the busyness quickly drowned out any still, small voice that might have been speaking to me in the small moments, preparing me for the Test that was coming on Friday night.
If I could only learn that those stretching moments – those times when it hurts and you just want the pain to stop so that you can get back to enjoying yourself – if only I could learn to view them like I view my workouts. When they hurt – when the muscles burn – that's when they are growing. Fat burns off when the muscles scream for relief. And I don't exercise to the point of comfort – I exercise to the point of break down. When I can't do one more press, then I go ahead and do one more and I feel victorious, because I know that I am affecting change in my body.
So, too, when life hurts, isn't the great Refiner of my heart turning up the heat to burn off the dross? Is He not, in an infinitely greater sense, my great Guide and Trainer who ramps up the spiritual exercise in order to help me grow? He pushes me to the point of break down so that my spiritual strength will increase. And my spiritual strength will only increase if He increases in my life. Why don't I feel victorious when faced with spiritual exercise? Probably because I don't push through in His strength. I holler “uncle” and wail that it's not fair and that I deserve some sleep and what are You thinking not letting me get any sleep and how am I supposed to be a Proverbs 31 woman after having a night like this?
I stop mid-exercise and refuse to press on. I refuse to cling to my Help and instead revel in my bad attitude which, at the moment, I always feel that I am completely entitled to having. My living Martha-like all week long left me weak and unprepared where I needed it most. The floors were clean, but my soul was dirty with the slime of self and the grit of ingratitude.
This week, instead of focusing so much on the external, may I put my focus first and foremost on spiritual house-keeping – tending my own soul well so that I may better tend the souls of my children. May I run first to His Word when my attitude slips, rather than pushing more to get more things done – my constant busyness drowning out His voice. May my children see in me a woman who, rather than being desperately in pursuit of a perfectly-groomed home, is desperately in pursuit of God. And if the house gets a little grimy in the process, may it be because our souls are filled with God's Word and sparkling with the joy of Christ.
Piper cries out and I hasten back to her room – and rather than put in the pacifier and race back out again, I put in the pacifier and pause to look, calling this place holy ground and declaring it to be all joy. I stroke her head and arrange the blankets around her chin and watch as her back rises and falls quiet and the pacifier moves in gentle rhythm – her eyelashes falling against her cheeks and little button nose all baby-soft. And she is beautiful.
