Epiphany

Lately I've felt a little asphyxiated by the passage of time, the whys and what-ifs of this world, the vast amounts of unknown. The pain and bitterness and destruction and death and the decay of society has been chafing at my soul, and I've felt crushed under the weight of regrets and shame. There's a constantly looping reel in my head of everything I perceive to be wrong with myself and the world, and there's an underlying, unrelenting anxiety about the next shoe to drop.
I've known for a little while now that I haven't been taking self-care very seriously. The upheaval of the last year has become an excuse to continue on this breakneck trajectory from one day into the next with very little time spent in stillness and introspection and surrender. It's been easier to just go, go, go. But the latter part of this summer I have just felt shattered and have come to the realization that I need desperately to Be still and put back together by the only One who can really do that. He used a simple trip the park this morning to begin that process I believe:

Watching my kiddos at the park this morning, my initial reaction was "It's all going by too fast. And I'm messing it up all the time. And soon they won't want to even be at the park with me."
Fast on the heels of all this Debbie Downer talk was the thought, "But you have today. And today they DO want to be with you at the park".
I literally stopped in my tracks.
It seems like a message I've heard a thousand different ways over dozens of years, but something hit me differently today.
And I realized that all of my conjecture about the future and pining for the past is futile.  I can't have yesterday and certainly can't know tomorrow. But I have TODAY.  And what do I have TODAY that I can celebrate? From the simple to the significant?

I believe this is where my healing lies. In shifting focus. I want to focus on LIFE and LIVING and the GIVER of it all. Even when the pain and decay most certainly invade, there can still be celebration and gratitude. And when everything else is stripped away, I can still celebrate the God of love who is preparing blessings and joy beyond what I could ever hope to experience here.

And so TODAY.
TODAY I have these amazing kids (who are growing up too fast BUT THAT'S NOT MY FOCUS RIGHT NOW) who still love a laid-back, sun-wrapped trip to the park with me. Who still find laughter and contentment in swings and slides and monkey bars.

I don't know about tomorrow, but I know that this is my joy TODAY.

My parenting knowledge in a nutshell (and it seriously probably wouldn't even fill a nutshell)

11 years ago today I became a mom for the first time. I shall commemorate it with this hideous photo of myself:

I think back on the person I was, the expectations I had, and all the experiences I've had since, and the only thing I can unequivocally say for certain after 11 years in the trenches is this - I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING.
I often wish I could go back to that person I was, about to embark on my journey into parenthood and tell me to just erase the drawing board, to throw it in. the. trash. To completely lay down every expectation I had about parenting and about who my kids were going to be. To eliminate all my ideas so that I wouldn't spend the next decade "shoulding" myself and my offspring to death. Nothing prepared me for being a mom. NOTHING. I have to remind myself of this anytime I'm tempted to give new parents or parents-to-be "helpful" advice or insight, gleaned from my (what feel like) MANY years of experience. There is really not one thing anyone could have said to truly prepare me for the incredible highs and devastating lows of this job, for how emotional and gut-wrenching it would be or how personally I would take it all. Two things my mom has said to me over the years have stuck, however. 1) If I didn't care, it wouldn't be hard, and 2) lower my expectations. And so I try to remember those two things in the midst of the low times.
I am almost 40 now (gulp), and I can truly say the 30's have been some of the best years of my life. Because I have just enough life experience under my belt and just enough humility gained from all that I (cannot stress this enough) DO NOT KNOW after said experience that I can sit back and breathe a bit. I have learned to give myself (a tiny bit) more grace and to extend that to others. I have gained greater compassion and empathy for those who both share my experiences and have completely different ones. Most of all, I have learned to open my hands and understand now that there is virtually nothing within my control, least of all my children.  My kids are who God created them to be from the moment of conception, and my job is not so much to control any sort of outcome where they're concerned, as it is to observe, know them deeply, and then guide accordingly. The best thing I can do for my babies, I've come to realize, is to give them God and give them over to God. That's pretty much it.
I was reading over Proverbs 3 this morning and find it to be such a great life passage for parents and our kids. James and I adopted as our "marriage scripture" verses 3-5: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight". That really just sums up what we want for ourselves and our children isn't it? To be able to trust the Lord, whatever may come in this unreliable world? There are no end to the number of things I don't understand down here, but there is comfort in knowing that knowing Him, walking with Him, experiencing His love and loving Him in return will keep my feet (and my kids') on the right path. I read a quote recently about how God's will for us is not the path itself we walk but how we walk the path. That's beautiful because again, there's no controlling what happens here or what choices others make, and it can be difficult to reconcile a loving God with this really brutal world. Who can say why He allows the vast amounts of suffering we see here? But His concern for me and for my boys and my daughter is that we choose to walk these difficult paths WITH Him.
So that about sums up my wisdom in parenting. Now if someone could just clue me in on how to get kids to do homework without whining and methods for ungluing their little eyeballs from a screen without nuclear meltdowns we'd be in great shape.