Work

A zillion things to get done. Or, at least, that’s how it feels. A zillion niggling little bits of business vying for my time, eating up my hours, needing to be completed.

This is the place where I become the irritable momma. This is when one more glass of water is a hardship, where a toddler who won’t nap is a catastrophe, where people, I just need one stinkin’ minute so please, please can’t you sit still while I get this done???

Everyone has work that needs to be tended, real pieces of have to that can’t always wait until that perfect window of occupied littles peeks open. It happens. And yes, children need to learn to deal with that. Self-control, respect, patience … all forged in the early fires of, “Momma needs you to wait.”

But much of the time? Much of the time, the issue is me. It’s my perception of what needs to be done when, of what is most important in that moment. So often, what looks like the most needful thing is the outside, the business, the phone call, the load of laundry. So often, what loses the battle is the small people I love with every ounce of my being, but take for granted in the little choices of my days.

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I pray daily to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, who tugs me to follow the leadings of a 4 year-old girl who needs a lap to curl into, or a 13 year-old boy who needs an ear. I know this about myself: left to my own devices, I will choose the clean floor over the group cookie baking, the completed newsletter over the read-aloud. I will do things, and do them well– but the cost will be felt in my irritability with my first, and most precious job. Leaning into an eternal perspective reminds me that I am called to invest in things deeper than what I might choose based on the tyranny of the urgent.

Some days I succeed. Some days I see that the clothes on the line can wait while I read one more chapter, or that serving dinner twenty minutes late is worth the time spent assembling paper lanterns. Others I fail miserably and go to bed feeling so accomplished (I did it all!) and then am hit with the realization that while my to-do list is empty, the buckets of my children’s hearts are just as dry.

It is a work in progress, this season of motherhood. Every day. And this is why I say, “thank goodness for grace!”

 

 

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