Sometimes something you hear or see or experience jars you from your complacency and allows you to see things for what they are in your own life. Sometimes it’s sitting on the beach, hot sand between your toes, sun on your face, kids giggling in the sparkling water and you realize how much you have taken your life for granted. Sometimes is something more heart breaking, hearing about a friend losing a child, sometimes it is something you hear that makes all the fire of anger stir your blood to dangerous levels, like hearing about a homeless woman who had her tent burned down because she wouldn’t sleep with the two men who took a match to her temporary home.
I am blessed. I am loved. I am full tonight, I will have a warm and safe bed to sleep in when I go to sleep, my children are safe, my husband is safe. I am blessed. YET, I am in a constant state of ‘taking it all for granted’. I will have a moment in the day where I look at something or hear something or think of something and be thankful or grateful and for a few moments I am reminded that I am indeed blessed beyond measure and then I see the dishwasher wasn’t emptied or the garbage is spilling over or the shoot didn’t go as planned or… or… and I am back in the cycle of taking it all for granted.
What right do I have to this life? Every breath is a gift really and yet I walk around as if it should all be about me. My life, my family, my church, my…my…my. Selfish to the core of my being and an ungrateful cow to boot.
In light of that truth then; you will understand why I am then caught off guard when I hear from God, hear his whispers on my heart telling me he KNOWS me, all of me, the ungrateful cow who is annoyed because small spoons keep getting put away in the large spoon spot, or the pasta bowls keep getting stacked under the cereal bowls. The selfish woman who isn’t thankful for her bed until she hears about someone who hasn’t got one because she won’t have sex with the strange men at the tent flap she calls home. He knows me, he whispers and not only that, he LOVES me. He seeks me, he protects me, he fights for me, he defends me, he created me and he died for me. I cannot be lost and if I wander he will come find me. He KNOWS all about me and he would do all of that for me.
Some days I am kissed softly on the cheek by my maker and he speaks words of love without conditions, some days he smirks and rolls his eyes and says ‘I love you even when…” Some days I think he smacks me upside the head and says “You don’t get it, nothing you do changes what I feel for you” and every single on of those ‘Some days” that realization just blows my mind. Today is one of those days.
L
Through the Lens of Motherhood 