In weakness and rejoicing

It’s really quiet in here right now. 

So quiet I can hear the traffic on the distant highway.

Ada’s never not usually very loud but at the moment she’s in her room with a cold, having inevitably caught Caleb’s bug after a week of telling him to give her MORE SPACE.

Caleb is sitting quietly in his room maybe doing homework but more likely reading a train magazine; I hear the occasional squeak of his office chair.

Lizzy is at her last volleyball practice of the season and so Jason is on the other side of the county with her. He’s on volleyball duty because Monday afternoons is the women’s Bible study I’m attending this fall. We’re doing a really good study through 1 Peter.

In a few minutes I’m going to figure out how to use the grill to have grilled chicken and a salad ready when they come home. 

It was a blissful weekend of rest and I can’t think too much about the fact that it’s over and time to do all the things again. Today I cleaned out the fridge, had a nice cup of coffee with Jason, made myself a decent sandwich for lunch, and went to Bible study. I won’t think beyond my evening plans of dinner, tidying the kitchen, and putting away the laundry. 

The inexorable return of fall leaves reminds me that God orders all things in His time and He is even more faithful than the repeating seasons. There was grace for today, and tomorrow there will be grace for tomorrow.

Broken

If managing an active family is like lifting weights, I seem to have gotten crushed under the weight and broken my leg.

Eight weeks straight of being out six nights a week; scratching my head over how to feed my hungry teenage athletes a nutritious dinner; cooking before noon and packing it up to travel or keeping it warm until we can eat at 8:00, etc etc, was a weight I could lift until I couldn’t. 

The first clue that I was buckling came as I found myself lying on the grass under a black walnut tree, having succumbed to exhaustion and fallen asleep on a blanket in the park while waiting out Lizzy’s volleyball practice, like an actual hobo. I came to and gazed up at the blue sky intersected with branches laden with tennis-ball-sized walnut hulls. I vaguely wondered if one would drop and hit me in the forehead, and if so, would it have enough force to concuss me? And if so, how long would I be ordered to rest in the hospital and everyone I know medically ordered to leave me alone?

That, and hearing a voice in my head wistfully saying, “Remember covid?”

Maybe if plague and brain damage seem preferable to one’s lifestyle it’s time to reevaluate.

The metaphorical snap drove me under a blanket one evening with an overwhelming paralysis. I can’t make dinner. I can’t answer any more questions. I can’t coordinate another carpool. I can’t pick up after anyone anymore. I can’t drive anywhere. I can’t answer any more texts.

How hard is it to heat up some dinner or text back a friend? Not hard, unless you’re trying to do it with an untreated broken leg.

hard cider sampling for Maddie’s 21st birthday

Jason gently administered emotional first aid. I thought I should be able to leg press the five hundred pounds I see other people cheerfully lifting. My family thrives on nonstop activity! I work multiple jobs and can’t wait to drive my kids places on my lunch break! My house is clean and I make better dinners than you!

But you don’t go to the gym and lift weights based on what you see other people doing. That’s how you get a broken leg.

Jason held me and brushed away my tears…and cleared our weekend schedule.

Caleb had the courtesy to get a head cold, which cleared up a couple nights while he stayed home and kept his germs to himself. When I was able to get out from under my blanket I did fix dinner that night, and we all sat down together as a household and ate it together, complete with candlelight and conversation and verbalized appreciation for the meal.

What to call that in my broken leg metaphor? A morphine drip?

I wrote a research paper for high school psychology once on the hero complex. Everyone wants to be a hero. It drives us to lift the car off the trapped child, to set up a ladder for the cat stuck in the tree, to keep all the balls in the air all the time, to leg press five hundred pounds.

This weekend is not hero weekend. This weekend is for a sit-down candlelight dinner, for takeout Chinese on the couch while we watch Harry Potter, for late Saturday morning waffles and coffee, for letting the car cool off. 

And for remembering that I’m loved even when I’m broken.

Remember

 

Aren’t you anxious about what comes next?

No, and this is why.

Circa 2003, when Jason and I were dating long distance and “telecommuting” was barely a thing, we decided Jason would approach his boss about letting him take his job remote so he could move to be near me. When I asked Jason if he thought the boss would say yes, Jason said, and I quote, “It would take a miracle.”

Shortly thereafter Jason moved near me and commencing telecommuting.

God provided for us through that job. Later, when remote work got old, Jason applied for and got a job at a wildly successful local tech company. And God provided for us and our then-growing family through that job.

After a time, that company gradually ceased to be successful and Jason quit to look elsewhere, eventually landing this most recent job. And God has provided for us though that.

And now God is providing for us via our nest egg, courtesy of aforementioned jobs.

What reason do I have to think God won’t provide for us tomorrow and next year and beyond?

Maybe we had reason to be nervous when we were twenty-three years old and hadn’t walked long in faith. But I have been young, and now I am old, and we can look back over the decades of our life together and see the various ways God has provided for us.

We can also see how faithful He has been in the very hard times—times we absolutely did not want to experience, but we are utterly thankful now for what has come of them and how He was with us in them. So why would I think that this time of uncertainty would be any different? How can I look back over so many years of God working for our good and think that now, this is the end of the line, we’re doomed, it’s the gutter of despair for us?

There may be voices that try to whisper this. But while there is breath in my body, Lord, let me utter the truth, that you have been faithful in my life for many years, and you have been faithful to your people for many many many years; You are the same yesterday, today, and forever; and you will not fail us, whatever our future holds.