thankfulness

What if…

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 2 Comments

So much news predicts such a grim future. Life as we know it gone. Futures forever changed. This generation will suffer the worst.

I’m glad I don’t know the future. Anticipating the unknown has usually proved more awful than actually walking through it for me.

But, what if all the adversity predicted is the severe road to a better future, a different life lived from a different source, for us and our kids?

Along those lines, I wrote the following lines…

What if all the losses taught us to mourn?

What if all the mourning taught us to empathize?

What if all the empathy taught us humility?

What if all the humility taught us our poverty of soul?

What if our poverty taught us to search?

What if in our searching we found God? Who knows loss. Who mourns. Who empathizes. Who endured poverty. Who meets our needs?

Our need for Him to restore our dignity. Forgive our wrong. Heal our wound. Feed our mouth. Guide our path… Replace our heart.

With a new heart. A heart warm, not cold. A heart alive, not dead. A heart that feels, not numb. A hear not sick anymore.

What if our hope was not on the stock market, the cure, the vaccine, the vindication, the political party, the back to normal?

But in Christ

Who makes all things new

Even this broken world

Even we broken people

Would we then welcome the losses that taught us to mourn?

The mourning that taught us empathy?

The empathy that taught us our poverty?

The poverty that taught our need?

And the need that taught us to search?

And the search that brought us to the heart of God?

To me, the stairs are the adversity and the joyful girl at the top, my daughter, like the joy of finding God along a hard steep, path in life.

Lessons from the Breakfast Buffet

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I took on the job of teaching the kids how to maximize the breakfast buffet. We are on vacation and my reasoning runs like this: well-stuffed children will not need a large lunch thus saving time and energy and money. We can just snack our way to dinner. A perfect vacation plan for me, a mom.20140112-120836.jpg

Except that the kids don’t know how to overeat. They naturally stop when satisfied! Unlike me, their parent, my children enjoy their most tasty treats on the buffet and then they do this weird thing…they stop. I get a few more bites in them but it is a challenge neither of us enjoys.

I, however, make sure I get the best of the buffet meaning that I eat the most delectable items. Cereal? That is cheap. Eggs Benedict? More please. I strategize to make sure I squeeze out the most from my experience before my stomach fills to the point of bursting.

Who enjoyed the feast more though? Me who got the most out of it? Or the kids who freely enjoyed it?

Ok. Ink on paper makes it clear. Of course they enjoyed it more! And I see how I miss out when I try to squeeze the last drop of value out of experiences like buffet breakfasts. Instead of taking in the delight of eating a meal I did not shop for, cook, or need to clean up I expend that energy trying to force a maximum perceived benefit. Striving after the wind.

I watch my kids receive with joy and I see what I want to become–an open receptor of these wonderful experiences. I want to receive with thanks what the Lord brings. I want to enjoy without the pressure of enjoying it the most. The most and the best add pressure and a drive that blocks my receptors. The most and the best increasingly seem like a trap that inhibits being in the moment and giving thanks for the gifts He gives.

I continue to decompress here on vacation. Maybe this realization is part of the casting off of the driven-ness I fall into in daily life. I do recognize this striving after the wind in more places than the breakfast buffet on vacation and I grieve what I missed.

A heart of gratitude and thankfulness for what is. Enjoyment of the moment. A settled confidence that another day will come with more to receive from the Great Gift Giver.

That’s a lot to miss out on. It is worth way more than a well-played breakfast buffet.

What blocks your ability to receive freely from the Lord?

 

Hotel Life

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Tonight is the ninth night in the third hotel over the past month. Such is not our normal life but, then, I wonder if normal really exists. It is our chosen life.

Yes, I chose this, I remind myself as my son emerges from the connecting room with his nose gushing blood. Did I mention Asian hotels love white duvet covers and sheets? Something about a broad, fluffy white bed drives my kids bonkers with desire to wrestle and jump but tables often get in their way.

Hotel manners must constantly be reviewed in such months as this one. Quiet in the hallways. Avoid pushing the doorbells to other rooms lest a sleepy man open the door on you.

Sometimes we discover that the fire in the lobby is actually an illusion you can stick your hand into. Then we converse long and hard about fire dangers.

New arguments begin about buttons in elevators and key cards to rooms. A confusing rotation ensues and I seem to always be the last to find out but the first to mess it up.

For all the extra stressors of hotel life, I started learning a lesson seven years ago when we spent 3 weeks in a hotel with a 2 year old and a 6 month old. I dreaded it, assured in my heart that boarding the flight for that trip meant entering some level of hell. Instead I discovered that hotel living yields its own sweet fruits.

An afternoon break means we pile on the bed together and watch cartoons in foreign languages. Bed time means scouting out creative places to make pallets. Two year olds and four year olds can share a bed but they do tend to use each other as pillows. We explore and sometimes our hotel hosts an Indian wedding with real Kuwaiti princes who own airplanes.

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Our transient months surely take their toll but today my heart fills with the treasured memories made when I chose to slow down and enjoy our crazy life.

Another day I may write a horror story or ten…we don’t always get connecting rooms…