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30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Foolishness {Day 1}

When I am old, I will be the kind of woman who smiles at young mothers and tells them to enjoy their babies. I will tell them to hug their children tight, laugh more, and worry less. I will not forget that parenting is hard, and I will not be so foolish as to tell a mother with a screaming two-year-old that she will miss these days.

But when I am old, I will remember that I did not always enjoy my children, and I will wish I had. I will remember that some days, I thought it was enough that my children were loved. It was enough that they were cared for. It was enough that we made it through the day and I had not yet been committed to an asylum.

I will remember that in my heart, I was jealous of my husband who could walk in the door from work and wrestle children without any thought to whether they’d be too wound up to go to sleep. I was envious of the grandmas and great-aunts and darling old neighbors who could simply be with my children without any thought to what had to be done.

I will remember that I acted as if enjoying my children was a nice “extra.” But it wasn’t always as important as the laundry.

When I am old, I will have learned that enjoying my children is not an extra. It is essential. It is transformative. It is powerful, and it cannot wait until they are older and it is easier.

Still, I have been a young mother, and I know that words like this from an old woman are not always welcome. A young mother will think it is hard enough to keep up with all the demands of motherhood without having to like it, too. It is hard enough to get through some days without completely losing it; the idea of enjoying the children in the midst of the mess is unfathomable.

But when I am old, I will have learned that this is exactly the point. Anyone can enjoy her children when it is easy. Anyone can smile when the family photos are being snapped. I certainly did that much. But to enjoy a child who is cold and distant, who can never seem to obey, or who just makes the messes messier…that is foolishness.

It is a foolishness that captures the hearts of our children and breathes the aroma of Christ into our homes. It is a foolishness that gives real hands and feet to love and chases insecurities away. It is a foolishness that raises motherhood from an out-of-fashion role to a means by which the world can see the very image of God.

There is something other-worldly beautiful about a mother who delights in her children. It smacks of the self-sacrifice and unconditional love we hear so much about but rarely see. In that simple, flesh-defying act of enjoying her children, a mother demonstrates the very heart of God for His own.

It is hard. It is foolish. It is glorious.

When I am an old woman, I will remember that I didn’t always enjoy my children the way I should have. But by the grace of God, I learned.

This is the introduction to our new series, 30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More. Please join us tomorrow as we jump into the practical side of enjoying your children more. Coming up, Day 2: Perspective.

{1} 31 Days of Blogging Martyrdom

If you’ve been around the blogging world for a bit, you may have noticed some of your favorite writers participating in a blogging challenge every October called 31 Days. It is an opportunity for normal, busy men and women to inflict pain upon themselves for the sake of community. It is blogging martyrdom, pure and simple. Fall on your pens, folks!

I was not about to do it.

Last year, when I had not even been blogging for a full twelve months, I stumbled upon this whole thirty-one-days-of-group-torment a little too late. Posts started popping up on October first and I had no idea why. “Huh, running a series must be a great way to grow a blog,” I thought.

Then I found out the real reason. It was like a blogging version of an Ironman competition, and I had just missed the starting gun.

“Whew,” I said to myself. “That was close.”

Still, the idea intrigued me: thirty-one days of straight writing, thirty-one days of posting brilliant content. At the end of thirty-one days, I would have so many words. I would have disciplined myself to write and post content every single day. Since I am not very disciplined, I couldn’t help but think, “This will be so great!”

November rolled around and all my blogging buddies were sleeping off their thirty-one day comas, and I began a series of my own.

It was only thirty posts, and that’s as close as I came to replicating the kind of diligent writing my friends had accomplished the month before.

See, I wasn’t very far into the first week of writing when I discovered that I am incapable of posting brilliant content every single day for thirty-one days. I have a two, maybe three-day brilliance capacity, max. My thirty-one day series turned into a six-week series, which turned into a two-month series. I think I managed to wrap things up before Christmas but I’m not really sure. Everything that happened after Thanksgiving is kind of fuzzy due to blogging toxemia.

But then the series came to an end. I slept again. I ate again. Actually, I ate all along it’s just that I was now conscious of the fact.

I reflected. I realized that I was not the same writer who sat down at her laptop on Day One. That series changed me. When I think back to that time, when every spare second of my day was spent wrestling with the truth of the Scripture and pinning it down into paragraphs and coherent sentences, I realize it was one of the sweetest, most difficult times of growth I have had in my adult life.

And I never wanted to do it again.

But I am.

Because it is October, and I believe God has something He wants me to write. I have trembled about it and made up all kinds of excuses because I don’t really like hard things, especially thirty-one days of hard things. I consulted the wisdom of my husband who confirmed that this whole idea is nuts. After all, October is a very busy month. We have extra responsibilities this month, and I’m already not doing very well at the responsibilities I have.

I am afraid.

I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of getting to Day 2 and running out of steam. I am afraid of writing at 3 am and sticking commas in all the wrong places and having you all know that I am not a very good writer after all. I am afraid of neglecting my family and the house and forgetting to feed the fish.

Most of all, I am afraid of writing words that are not His just so I have something to fill up the screen.

But then I think about burying talents, and I don’t think God likes it much. It seems to me that if I have the choice between a shovel and a keyboard, I’d better pick the keyboard. Because there is no failure like the failure to try. There is no sin like refusing to step out on the waves if He calls.

I doubt. I falter. But that’s part of walking, and I am marching to the cadence of the Word pounding in my ears:

“His divine power has given us everything we need

for life and godliness through our knowledge of him

who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

–2 Peter 1:3

Do I believe it? I’ve spoken on this very verse so many times. I’ve gone to MOPS groups and said it loud over the noises of the babies. I’ve stood in front of high school students and quoted it to crossed arms and slouched bodies. Every time, the crowd presses in, hungry, because this is promise that is almost too good to believe.

Is it true?

Think about it. God’s Word says He has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Everything. It’s almost too much to comprehend.

Sometimes, the best way to understand truth is to put it into story. Jesus did that for us when he told parables. I like to think about him gathering the big kids around and making profound things simple with a “Once upon a time…”

For the next thirty-one days, or however long it takes my frail self to get the words out, we are going to spin a tale so we can see the truth of what it means to be rich in Christ like Peter tells us we are.

Like any good story, it’s going to begin like this: “Once upon a time…”

Join me tomorrow for Day 2.

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Harvest {Day 30}

The beginning is a great place to start! Click here for Day 1.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to grow blackberries here. They sprout up and creep out wherever any bird has dropped a seed. The ditches are full of them, as are the hedgerows. People spray them with weed killer and hire goats to eat them, but the blackberries can’t be beat. They line every road and eat up tamed property until it’s turned wild again with thorny brambles and stone-hard green fruits.

But if the summer is warm and the fall dry, the berries on all these wild vines begin to swell and ripen until they drip down in inky clusters. Everywhere, the air is heavy with the scent of sweet fruit and blackberry wine, and people come out with Tupperware bowls and empty ice cream buckets to forage for the makings of a pie.

My husband loves a good blackberry pie. He starts thinking of blackberry pie around June when the brambles are in bloom and the neighbors are in full blackberry attack mode. Mr. Greenlee is out in his yard with clippers and napalm, but Jeff is up on a ladder wearing leather gloves, carefully redirecting the willful vines through the evergreens so they’ll grow where the sun shines the brightest. He cranes his neck when we drive past berry-laden ditches and silently makes a plan for September.

When the berries start to soften in the sun, I know there will be buckets stowed between the seats of the minivan “just in case,” and extra trips out to Jeff’s favorite berry-picking spot. It’s right along a walking trail that follows a river past an eagle’s nest. People come there every day to run or ride horses and to watch the osprey swoop down into the water for fish. Sometimes there are otters or delightfully lazy snakes that slither slowly over the rocks and a boy who must remember that his mother doesn’t want him to pick blackberries with hands that stink of snake.

But rarely, very rarely, are there any other berry pickers. We live in a place where “organic” is practically a religion and people pride themselves on eating local and composting the leftovers. But berries? Well, berries are just a pain to pick.

I thought about this one afternoon when Jeff led us on a berry-picking mission down the gravel path along the river. The days had been particularly beautiful, warming the blackberries until they tasted like they’d been dipped in sugar. But we’d already been out picking several times, and I had other things on my mind. I did not feel like fighting the brambles and letting them claw through my jeans while I filled my bucket little by little with those frustratingly small berries. It seemed like a waste of time, and I still had a few splinters from the last time we did it.

“It’s such a short season, Kristie,” Jeff said when he noticed my lack of enthusiasm. “It could rain tomorrow and then it will all be over.”

It happened every year. When the clouds in the forecast resulted in actual precipitation, the berries turned snowy with mold in a matter of hours, and that was the end of the blackberry picking. We needed to take advantage of every sunny day that stretched into fall to fill up the buckets and gather in the harvest.

So I was silent and focused my attention on the task at hand. Birds flew overhead, swooping bugs into their beaks, fattening up for the long flight south. The kids chattered and hummed and filled themselves full of what was left of summer. It was lovely, really.

Faith stood next to me, slowly picking berries, turning each one over and checking for bugs before putting it in her bucket. “She is getting tall,” I thought. Her tenth birthday was coming up, and I was having trouble getting my mind around it. It’s such a short season, Kristie, I heard Jeff say, but he was far down the path with Jonathan, hacking down vines with a machete so the kids could pick the berries hiding underneath.

It’s such a short season. It seemed to me he had said the same thing much earlier in my life, at a time when I thought my talents were better used on something other than parenting. Foolishly, I thought God’s will for me was a little less…ordinary. I had failed to see the shortness of the season and the richness of the fruit all around me.

I looked at Faith. Her eyes are green, a little lighter than mine. She smiled. “You’re really good at picking berries, Mom,” she said.

I glanced down. Without even realizing it, I had filled the better part of my bucket.

“I think that’s the best way to do it,” she continued. “Just find a spot and start picking. If you keep walking, looking for a better spot, well, first of all, you might get lost, and second of all, you won’t get very many berries.”

“I think you’re exactly right,” I said, wondering how my life would have been different if I applied that advice to other areas of my life.

“So I think it’s just best to sit right down, and don’t even worry about the ones you can’t reach. If you can’t reach them, they’re not for you.” She shrugged at the simplicity of the thought.

It was a hard truth to swallow. The biggest and best berries were always just out of my reach, it seemed. Other paths were more interesting and less full of briars and that’s why more people walked there. That’s why I wanted to walk there.

It was foolish to sit down when the path kept on going, foolish to waste time picking berries and fighting brambles, foolish to embrace a task most people don’t want to do. It was foolish, but it was also brave and wonderful and perfectly delightful. Long after the vines have withered and the berries have gone, I will be enjoying the fruits of my labors. Rich pies, cobblers and jams, and a freezer full of fruit to carry us through the winter and beyond—all because we stayed faithful to the task. Long into winter and beyond, we will be enjoying the deep and satisfying harvest of a job well-done.

The season is short. The work is hard. But the result is worth it all.

Micah enjoying the fruit of the season

Thank you for joining us for this series. It has been a (busy) joy!