12/2/08

my kids are kind of annoying lately with whiny responses, lying, disobedience.  you know, kid stuff.  i consider what i have to talk about, what is occupying our days and this is all that is in my head.  this is why i don’t update often.  if you publish how annoying your kids are it makes it seem like a big deal when really it is just normal life’s ebb and flow.  we had 2 weeks of stomach bug descending on mckaela, me and eli.  mike welcomed an enduring cold instead.  i keep telling him he lucked out but he isn’t totally buying it.  mike is pretty patient with my moodiness.  he bears the cost of the kid’s wearing me out.  some months he seems needier than others.  but the last few weeks he has not joined in the whining in our house.  it has been a welcome reprieve for us relationally to not feel like there are three kids here for me to raise.  i feel like he is on my team again.  maybe he feels like i am on his too.  i am not sure. 

thanksgiving was wonderful.  a family actually cooked and brought over a fabulous dinner for us and mike was wheeled up to the table to eat and enjoy.  he preferred most the mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.  and decided he had eaten too much as he laid in bed later.  it was just like normal again!…kind of!  mike’s parents joined us for a long weekend and spruced up our house with various needed projects.  that kind of felt like normal again too–mike was always conniving them into slave labor and i have been too soft on them in recent years.  we were all sad to see them head back to ohio.

i haven’t felt really inspirational lately.  i have been switching to the outside of this experience and keeping up with the websites of some families in our lives experiencing tragedies of their own.  it is strange to sit on the outside looking in on their lives, identifying with much of the mix of emotions, frustrations and surreal feel of life they describe.  it is odd to pray and prod my family into daily prayer for these families.  to hope that i am doing all possible to love them from the distance i am–relationally, physically or ability-wise.  it feels like i ought to have so much more to offer from the places we have been.

mostly i just feel like this life is a miracle.  it is annoying and smelly and tiring and ill-tempered and miraculous.  it makes no sense how it fits together.  how i can want to squish my kids in anger and in love.  how i can find this husband too much and also just what i need.  how there are too many websites listing too much sorrow and there can still be a God that holds the pieces of our hearts together and “binds up our wounds” (Ps 147:3).  i guess i feel like it might be nice if i felt like i had more inspiration to offer but miraculously i also feel ok with simply living in awe day to day that God can work with me– a short-tempered, worn, child myself.  and this miracle of today doesn’t need to make sense and it is no less a miracle when my car smells like vomit or there is another family to pray for or life doesn’t go our way.  i will simply live in awe at how God offers hope in darkest nights during this season of celebrating the hope of the world born into the smelliest place, a barn on earth.