Moms it's Monday #3

Most of the time it’s those chill stay-at-home days with the kids that are the most challenging. For certain, we have days that are much to busy with driving around and going here or there. But the stay at home days reveal what is really going on with me, the kids, and the relationships between all four of us. It’s on those days that I feel focused on just our family, just my parenting, and just being a mom. And when I am in a right spirited place it’s okay with me to be about that one thing. And when I am not, I am wishing for better plans, cursing the weather or scheduling our next week to look busier than a bride the week of her wedding.

In her chapter of Cold Tangerines called “ladybugs,” Shauna Niequist talks about being amazing at multi-tasking at her job prior to staying home with her son. But then talking about the difference when just spending time with her son, she says, “All of a sudden, what’s valuable is not the multitasking, but the single task – being with him, only him, and doing nothing else.”

Even those of us that aren’t great multi-taskers are also not great at just focusing on one thing when it comes down to it. We make lots of plans, our calendars are full, we’re on the phone, we’re checking such and such site or email multiple times a day, we’re fixing this, cleaning that, reading this, stopping by here or there. We’re all multi-tasking…or at least continually-tasking, even if it’s one thing at a time, it’s a long list of tasks. We pop in on relationships and we’re gone for another week. We stop by and we’re gone. We are so in and out of everything in our lives, from errands all the way to grieving with people. And I not saying everyone is wrong who isn’t doing just one single thing, the same thing, every day of their lives. But I guess I am suggesting that maybe sometimes God does ask that we do that, and we wriggle, and try to pry ourselves out, because that might make us feel stuck or trapped, which is probably the worst word an American in our generation would like to feel.

What Shauna is getting across in this chapter has been one of my TOP revelations of the past four years of my life. And it took a lot of wriggling to accept it and rejoice in it. This is the truth that I can do the one thing that God has asked me to do and that doing that one thing might just be how he intends to carry out a multitude of changes and blessings in my heart and life, if only I will press in. And if only I will believe him that that one thing I put my hands to daily is very valuable to him.

Today as I was getting my heart ready for my day, as my kids were upstairs with Jason, as they always are when he’s getting ready, I felt compelled again to 1 Peter. It says to “prepare your minds for action” and I was praying that God would ready in my heart and mind what I would need in order to carry out the right behaviors as a wife and mom that day. And a verse or two later it said, “so, be holy in all that you do.” And that resonates clearly with what we are talking about now, that no matter what I am putting my hands to, there is still a calling on it. One might read that verse and feel a religious expectation from it, as if God is always having a watchful, condemning eye on me. Or maybe what it means is that if I am doing something, anything, God is placing VALUE on that circumstance, conversation, or happening, as small as it may seem. And he is saying that it is important to him, valuable to him that I see this small life as an endless and infinitely important grounds for growing the capacity of my heart and changing others lives simultaneously, all for his glory.

The last sentence that caught my eye more than any other in the chapter was when Shauna was comparing focusing on doing the one thing of being a stay at home mom with Henry to being a writer because in both of those things what was important was not getting carried away but instead to be devoted to a single thing. She said, “Writing is about choosing the one narrow thing and following it as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head.”

I. love. that.

The “as far as it will take me” line gives me precise wording to something I have been feeling the Lord say to me for a long time. It’s been like a vague, understood encouragement from him to be obedient, persistent, determined in the same direction because he was still working on me, still changing me, still using this one role in my life to make me new. And it’s like he’s been asking me to walk in this calling as far as He desires to take me. We have these moments in Christianity when we say things like, ‘Now I totally understand __’ or ‘I used to think __ but now God showed me __’ as if we now have the full mind of Christ about one particular thing. But God is so huge and we are so silly. If He does grace us with a revelation or clarity to understand how he sees things, it is such a minute fraction of the full picture that it boggles my mind that any of us claim to be done learning about something of Him. Motherhood has been a really specific, vivid example to me of this idea that I need to walk with the Lord through this very particular journey as far as it will take me, through many lessons, many revelations, many humbling circumstances, many trials and many victories. How far does the Lord want to take me in this to accomplish his purposes? I just need to keep going to find out.

The snaps and crackles remind me of those maddening thoughts that flood a woman’s mind like, ‘what are you doing with your life?’ and ‘this isn’t enough’ (as if a regular job is – ha ha!’, and ‘you could really do this calling plus something else so that you’re still using all of your talents.’ The snaps and crackles are endless and sometimes they even come in the simple form of trying to make too many playdates or checking our email and facebook so many times we haven’t even planned good time with our kids or getting our kids into too many activities and classes so as to avoid that bare living room experience that sometimes makes our brains feel like mush. Snaps and crackles is a great way of describing those random little thoughts or ideas or accusations or pursuits or lies or false dreams that pop in without warning and simply are just trying to get us to do something else.

My life right now is about choosing the one narrow thing God has ordained for me to do in nurturing and caretaking for three little ones. And I want to follow that calling as far as it will take me, instead of chasing all the snaps and crackles in my head. Yes. Wow.