Tonight, I was sitting on the couch scrolling through my camera roll and deleting hundreds of images from my phone. Blurry photos of our dogs, shots of door knobs, wildly unflattering angles of my chin (both of them) and other seemingly mundane subjects that caught the attention of my ten year old son.
This mindless task was busying my hands so I could decompress from being on call in all the categories of life during the day. So often, I find myself reaching for a distraction instead of sitting with discomfort (i.e. the only place change actually begins anyway) and tonight was no different. I was tired, and this seemed like an activity that had just the right amount of productivity to quell the never ending demand for performance I tend to require of myself (another topic for another day).
And then I saw it. And my eyes welled.
This shot.
It didn’t even include our faces but I knew exactly what I was thinking in the moment it was taken. I was criticizing myself. Feeling the sting of awareness that a present moment was sure to be gone too soon. I was holding this tiny person in my arms and thinking of just how fleeting the time is in our lives that she’d actually fit there, curled up on my lap. I had caught myself saying, “yes love but in just a little while!” Or, “we’ll have to wait!” more times than I wanted to over the week so I knew I needed to bring back to focus intentionality. Especially with her. My baby and only daughter. She is last in the line of most fantastic children to ever grace the planet (not peer reviewed, certainly biased) and she is more precious to me than she will ever know. And even still. The pressure, the chatter, the demands of life can be so heavy. The beckoning (and at times inexplicably ominous) glow of my device and the tick of the clocks on the wall can so easily shift my gaze from her precious face. A face that’s turned toward me, not with demand but with invitation. Always a beautiful, heavenly interruption of all the hurry and self important nothingness that constructs so much of our experience as adults.
In that moment, even with the critique and the sobering awareness of exactly where in time I was and how quickly it all goes, there was still. There was quiet.
There was no longer rush and worry. There was peace and humility. There was breathing…. and the right kind of heartbreak. The kind that refines and refocuses and repents. The kind that shifts our eye so our whole body can be flooded with light 🤍
The kind that clarifies how truly strange it is that the value and identity we tend to chase pretending to be things we aren’t, is readily found in the eyes of our kids and in spite of everything we actually are. Humans in process. Becoming more like Jesus with every piece of who we were told we are or needed to be being laid at His perfect feet.
As so I prayed, “Lord thank you for my son. Who saw a moment of tenderness and thought, ‘that’s nice. Almost as nice as that picture of the dog’s butt two frames back. Mom clearly needs this one too.’ Bless our boys. Their humor and levity and love of bodily functions. And also deep, beautiful wisdom.”
“Lord, you have given me these children and this life. In this tiny blip of human existence you have allowed me to co-labor with you here and now, for my absolute delight and Your glory. Help me not to miss it. Help me to be see the beautiful things, the worthwhile things. Especially the things the enemy would label as anything but what they actually are: invitations to joy and surrender and humility and freedom.
Jesus help me place all that I’m carrying in your hands so I can hold hers. So we can spin and swirl unencumbered by the weight of everything I wasn’t designed to carry. And everything you’re offering to. Lord thank you for the picture, it’s so much more than a picture.”
How appropriate to post on her 6th birthday eve. 💖