Life Archives - Page 2 of 21 - Kristen Anne Glover

On Wings of Eagles

An eagle is soaring outside my kitchen window. I stand by the sink with my hands in the bubbles and I watch him, dark wings, flash of white, large against the clouds. Beneath him runs the water and the fields and a mile of sky, and above him is everything that cannot be contained by this earth.

His silhouette catches my eye in the blue of the day. Only an eagle has wings like that.

In wide, lazy circles he rides the thermals up into the atmosphere, up so high, I imagine he’s feeling the joy of his making in the presence of his maker.

I watch him as the dishwater grows tepid. Circle…circle…circle. Great counter-clockwise movements bring him up over my house where I can no longer see him and back out over the Puget Sound where surely other eyes are watching him too.

The eagle’s wings remain steady the entire time. He does not use any effort to stay up in the sky. In fact, his wings hardly move at all.

I wonder how long the eagle can soar without actually flying. The minutes pass.

One…two…three…

His tail feathers flick slightly for balance, and every once in a while, the eagle tilts his wings to keep from flying off into heaven. But he does not pump his wings even once.

With wet fingers, I flip through our bird book to the pages filled with beautiful raptors. I find out an eagle can fly 10,000 feet up in the air because he can spread out those great big wings and let the wind carry him up. He does not have to depend on his own strength to rise higher than all the other birds. He simply waits.

There’s probably a lesson in that for me.

I know in an instant I have been trying too hard. I have been muscling my way through this day, trying to make things happen because I forget that He is able.

Unexpected obstacles have thrown me off course. I have been beating my wings trying to catch up because it all seems so important and urgent

I am weary.

And I have not flown very high.

“Like a swallow, like a crane, so I twitter;

I moan like a dove;

My eyes look wistfully to the heights;

O Lord, I am oppressed, be my security.”

Is. 38:14

I am oppressed, yes, by my own fluttering. Those heights I long to reach? He is the one who must lift me there.

I long to soar like that.

Later that day, when the eagle had long since flown off, I crawl into bed with my Bible. Even with the reminder to wait, it has been a day of scrambling. “Pick a Psalm,” I say to my husband, “and I’ll read it to you while you get ready for bed.”

“Psalm 151,” he says.

“Oh, behave.”

He pokes his head around the bathroom door and smiles at me with a toothbrush in his teeth. “Okay, how about Psalm 147.”

I begin to read the ancient words and come to the ones the Spirit has been trying to speak to me all day.

“The Lord favors those who fear Him,

Who wait for His lovingkindess.”

Psalm 147:11

I stop and read them again, and Jeff looks at me. “Wow,” he says, because he knows how hard it has been to fly today and how much we have wanted God’s lovingkindness to come without much waiting.

My mind goes back to the eagle, and I remember how he soared without effort on wings I could not see. I knew why he was circling so high above my head. A bird of that size needs to eat, and often. But the eagle’s size makes hunting an exhausting ordeal. It simply cannot support itself in flight long enough to get the food it needs to survive.

But God knows what the eagle needs. He created it in such a way that its very search for sustenance is dependent on a power other than its own. The eagle must wait on the wind to be lifted up. And the wind does not fail.

When the eagle is most in need, it is most able to rest in the provision God has already made for it. It can search without growing tired, it can soar without growing weary.

Beautiful words float into my head, words I know better than to have forgotten.

“Even youths grow weary and tired,

And young men stumble and fall,

But those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength;

They will mount up with wings like eagles,

They will run and not grow weary,

They will walk and not faint.”

Is. 40:30-31

Oh, to trust it to be true!

But today is a new day, and my hunger and need is just as real as it was yesterday. Only today, I am keeping my heart and mind on the One who can sustain me through my need.

Reclaiming the Loo

Today, my friend Abbie invited me over to her place. She’s a mom of five just like me, including twins, just like me. Since Abbie is so much like me, I figured she would sympathize with one of my mom-problems: how to get the children to leave me alone when the bathroom door closes.

Am I the only one whose children think going to the bathroom is a group activity? I think not.

Mothers of the World, it’s time we reclaim the loo. Join me over at Five Days 5 Ways and find out my devious plan to help us do just that.

The White Crib

My first baby in the white crib

*100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: 34

I remember when we first found the crib. It had been tucked away in the attic of our seminary apartment building and forgotten. We were the supervisors of the building, so when no one claimed it, my husband brought it home because my swelling belly reminded him that we were going to need it.

All the parts were there, so we cleaned it and set it up in the walk-in closet of our one-bedroom apartment because there was nowhere else to put a crib. I cried when I saw it and shut the closet door. I was not ready for what that crib represented.

Just a few months later, my first little baby was asleep in that crib. I would stand there next to her and watch her sleep, rolling the word “daughter” around in my mind as if to make the idea less foreign and more real. Some things just take time, I learned. But I didn’t know it then.

There was another baby soon, and another—enough to dull the edges of early motherhood until it did not feel strange to call another person mine.

Every single one of my babies slept in the simple white crib with the arched wood ends and the wheels that liked to fall off if I tried to move it. There were scratchy little teeth marks on the railings from slobbery, teething toddlers and places where the paint had been chipped off by Matchbox car wheels when the twins were supposed to be sleeping, but weren’t.

Years passed the way years do, and it came time to take the crib apart and move the twins into real beds. But I couldn’t do it. I kept them in their cribs even though I often found that Paul had climbed in with Micah. Once or twice, he even got his fat little leg pinned against the wall as he tried to make his escape, and once or twice, he even fell headlong onto the carpet and Micah had to tattle all about it in pantomime because he couldn’t say all the words for “That fool tried it again.”

They needed a real bed, and I knew it.

But there was that crib. The crib that held all the babies that softened my independent, selfish heart into the heart of a mother. How different I had become over the course of the years. How different it felt to set up that crib for the first time than it did to take it down for the last time!

The last time.

That was the thing. Every other time the crib had been vacated, it was because a new baby was getting too big to sleep in the bedroom with me. A new baby needed the spot occupied by a now-big-brother or sister. A new baby had come into the home.

But these little babies stretched up and thinned out and turned into little men right before my very eyes, and there were no more little babies to take their place. There aren’t going to be any more babies.

I took a screwdriver to the old white crib with the scratchy teeth marks and the chipped paint and the railings where five little babies had learned to stand up before they had learned to sit back down.

And I cried hot, mama tears for all of it.

My husband walked by and crinkled up his eyes at me and wrapped me up in a hug because I really am the most psychotic person on the planet.

The white crib has stayed in the garage next to a gnarly old bookcase that needs some attention. I came across it this weekend while I was attempting to organize and straighten out and clean up all the stuff that has piled up in this house. “You should sell that,” my husband said.

I should.

But I am the kind of mother who likes to keep the things that remind me of where I’ve been and what God has done. That simple white crib represents many years of God at work in my life. It is a symbol of my stubbornness and my redemption and the incredible mercy of God. It seems as if things like that should be set up and looked at and remembered. But you can’t very well keep an old white crib forever.

Or can you?

My mind started spinning when I saw the crib in the garage, and while I really didn’t intend to keep it, a crazy idea came into my head. Perhaps I could set up a stone of remembrance in the form of an old white crib. Perhaps I could find a way to keep a memory of the incredible miracle of God in my life. Perhaps the old white crib was not quite ready to move on.

Join me tomorrow to see what became of the crib I couldn’t seem to give away.

My last baby in the white crib

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