Being a mom, even of just two, has forced me to figure out quicker and more efficient ways to do almost everything. My mind has become a super-computer of sorts, constantly thinking about what’s next on the agenda and how I can simplify. Spaghetti takes 3 pots on the stove, one to brown the meat, the other to make the sauce that the meat would be added to and the third for the noodles. But 3 pots used means 3 pots to clean. If I can somehow condense this process I will save 5 minutes washing that third pot later.
Thoughts like these dance around my head all day long. About just about everything. Incentive at the end of the day to win back five extra minutes: a face wash. Ten minutes, mouth wash and use of a dusty nail file. Fifteen minutes and I’m considering a bubble bath.
My prayer life has also felt the impact of pretty consistent demands, starting at 7am and ending 12+ hours later. But what I anticipated would be a major sacrifice — long hours “with the Lord” gone, in exchange for non-stop output — has turned out quite different. Maybe just to show me that just when I think I have my arms around God’s economy, He shows me His complexity.
I thought that long, uninterrupted hours with the Lord was the way to the wisdom and sense of His presence which He dispensed. But the past year, with two in tow and preparing for two more, has been markedly my biggest heart growth spurt (at least from my on-the-ground assessment). While I still get a few pockets a week and some time each morning to escape to Him, the outpouring has been coming at my kitchen sink.
And the prayers that have come from water-pruned hands held out have been simple. Let them know they are loved. Root them and ground them in your love. Give them the ability to comprehend the width and depth and length and heights of your love.
This year, I’ve gotten a true taste of the Father’s love. It’s been a sip, not even yet a drink. A brief encounter, compared to all that’s ahead. A drop. But that drop has brought health to long-accepted ailments, freedom to my captive mind, validation against hidden-from-most insecurities. And I want more. Not just for me, but for my entire family.
It’s as if God has been saying to me, “You can go about your life looking back on my brief interruptions in it, and you will have a story to tell. A pretty sweet story. Or you can take this drop of rain as a sign that there is more to come, and engage with me in the asking for it. Not just for you, but for your children and your husband as well.”
And I don’t want a one-time encounter with God’s love. I don’t want to tell “The Story About 2010” five years from now, with nothing to add. Our testimony is not meant to be a static account of our one-time brush up against Jesus. I want to fill the pages of a history book with my story, and then my children’s stories, and their children’s stories.
I can stay where I am. The story, thus far, is good. And it would impact my family and be told for years to come. And it would even be pleasing to God. But His word tells me about a place of exceedingly, abundantly more than I can ask or imagine … that stops shorter if I don’t even ask or don’t even imagine. I want the fullness of all I can have in Him. Not just for me, but for my children and my husband.
The myth of motherhood, the one that says you are somehow disqualified from being fervent about anything other than cloth diapers, is being dispelled at my kitchen sink. My short, but heartfelt prayers (that are mostly just scripture cause I’m not that creative) — in between read-aloud’s and sweeping up play dough — have His power resting on them. I know it because most everything about a caffeine-less existence that starts at 5:45am feels like survival.
And these days I’m praying for more. I want to be filled.
I want my children to be marked, not by abandonment, but by love. I want my husband to encounter the Father while he plugs away at his computer in his office one floor below. I want our days to be filled with God-stories, things I may not have noticed before I started asking for more than just that one drop. I want be one who has been impacted by the Father, not just once, but over and over and over again.
Fill the pages of my history book, God.
