Choosing to See.

Let them be little...

  

Because "childhood is a journey...not a race."

And because this "mission of motherhood" is so very much more than making sure that my house is immaculate and keeping up with the Jones'.  This job that we have - this sacred enterprise - is also so very much bigger than the mundane monotony, sleep deprived days, and comparing our post-baby bodies with somebody else's.

It's about shaping little lives.

And it's about hearing little hearts.

It's about finding God in all the little details.

And it's about "being all there."

During the mundane moments of laundry mountains and sleep deprived days...

In the midst of the perpetual perfume of baby spit-up and endless reminders of "don't hit your brother"...

During these days of change and of tag-teaming life with your soulmate...

On the days where mothering feels like a joke...

And in the moments when you feel you are the walking dead.

For the days when for the life of you - you can't get your baby to sleep...

For the moments when you don't have the answer for your heart weary teen...

And during those times when you are the one who hurts their little hearts...

For the times when it feels like too much...

And when you just know that someone could do it so much better...

This is where God is.

And maybe when we take the time to stop and see...and when we stoop ever lower and allow what doesn't matter in the first place to take its rightful spot of lesser importance...maybe then, we can even find God Himself framed in these moments of crazy.

And maybe during these moments of ordinary...these days of mind-numbing repetition and of bone aching busy...we can remember that Here is the only place where He can truly be found in the first place.  And we'll remember that Here is the only moment that we are assured of.  There are no guarantees of tomorrow... here and now is the gift...and time is no respecter of persons...

And, maybe that's what our Enemy has hoped we'd forget.

Maybe he'd rather we mix up priorities and feel like huge failures.

He likes days of madness when we don't stop to see.

He wins when we don't deeply believe that what we do is a Heavenly calling.

...when we believe the lies that we are not enough...and that we don't matter. 

And he succeeds when we blur through our days and when we look back and only see our mistakes.

But, it's about so.  much. more...

It's about being "fully there" in the midst.

It's about being present.

In the middle of these whirling and swirling days of life with little ones...

It's about remembering that they are just ours on loan in the first place.

And, so because "TODAY is the childhood our kids will remember..."

And because Jesus "suffered the little children" and said "forbid them not to come unto me"....

Because God has entrusted four little souls to me and to no-one else besides me...

He must think that I am up for this job.

  

And because little kids grow up into great big teenagers, I think He wants me to remember this, as well:

"Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what.  If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big...because to them all of it has always been big stuff." ~ Catherine M. Wallace

That's pretty important to remember.

...And pretty easy to forget.

If we 

don't...

ever...

stop.