a prayer of no guarantees

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Now on to the meat of something that has been tumbling in my head a long time, waiting to be polished.

Today my 2 year old daughter smacked my 6 month old son in the face with a large cardboard block. Pretty hard too. She didn't mean it, she was just twirling with helicopter arms and got too close to his face and boom, impact. Had I seen it coming I would have interceded, and I often save him from sore toes or well intended hug smotherings. However, as much as I love every square inch of him I can't block every shot.

I absolutely love my two kids, I hope this isn't a big secret to anyone in my life either online or otherwise. When I take a look back at all the junk and pain I have gone through with my immediate family one of my first instincts is to figure out a way to make sure that nothing like that ever happens to my precious boy and girl. I want to keep them physically safe. I buy top of the line car seats and follow safety standards to the letter. I also want to keep them emotionally safe and I want to do everything I can to make sure that they don't lose their parents as early or as tragically as I did. I lost my Dad at the age of 49 to heart disease and so along those lines I eat very little red meat, drink red wine and pay close attention to my blood pressure and cholesterol levels. My mom died from mental Illness and so I go to counseling, stay active, and I try to keep a good pulse on my emotional well being so that I can catch any problems early.

I'm a realist, I know I can't protect them from all hurts but I guess I wish for them the bare minimum. I want them to appreciate the depth of life, with its highs and lows, but I do pray that God shields them from the big and rare hurts. The ones that only befall a few.

This is my prayer for my children, and in a way it is my prayer for everyone I love.

My dear precious ones, until you are parents you will not understand how much I treasure you. I delight in your bright eyes and endless energy even on my worst days. Your curly hair and huge smiles have made me thankful to a level I never knew possible. I want to put a hedge around all of us to guarantee that this innocent joyful living will last forever. It is with a heavy heart that I need to let you in on one of life's more painful secrets. There is no hedge that will keep out pain, brokenness and loss.

This brokenness is the reason I can't give you the gift of knowing your grandparents. However, I am deeply dedicated to helping you know who they were so you can carry parts of them with you as you bring your own unique gifts into this world.

I am doing everything in my human capacity to keep you safe from things that try to break you both physically and emotionally. I am coming to the edge of the realization that my love and precautions can't keep the breaks from happening to you. So I am jumping in and rethinking my strategy. A life with no pain isn't really living and so for you I pray just enough pain to appreciate the joy. I know you will have disappointments, failures, and breakups and I will be there for all of those tears. I pray that as much as possible you learn well from the mistakes of myself and others so you can avoid some of life's potholes. I pray that I have the strength to let you fall on occasion, so you can learn how to pick yourself back up. Above all else I pray that God protects you from the thousands of things I worry may befall you. I will do my best to lead you into situations that will give you a knowledge of your powerful and loving God, and that your Dad and I will model trust in him through the way we live our lives. I pray that you will trust in the love of God as you discover it in relationship with him, through his beautiful creation and through interacting with the people whose lives intersect yours.

I will be around as long as I possibly can, and while I am I will do everything in my power to point to a God who will sustain you more than I ever could. Gods love, grace, and providence are the ultimate healers. If you go to him for your truth and healing, you will weather any storm that this "no guarantees" world throws your way.

Amen and Amen.

life... with sprinkles.

Have you ever felt like the farther you go on the journey of your life, the more you have to learn? This feeling is very real to me right now. I have had a very tough year, and that's putting it mildly. I have dealt with some heart breaking and extremely difficult circumstances and I've continued to solider through them. For me, this is a point of pride, because I feel as though it speaks to my strength and my resolve, and in a way it does. However lately I have come to realize that with all this fighting and forward motion I have picked up some unhealthy thought patterns and coping mechanisms.

I have come to realize that I do life in battle mode with armor on all the time. I believe that I have to fight for every good thing, for every moment of peace and happiness. Like a cunning secret agent I trust no one and nothing. Each moment that ticks by on the clock is one that could bring me another blow and I need to be prepared. Now, I am sure you are already aware that this is flawed thinking. If I keep this up it will rob my life of the fullness God wants for me. You see every solider has to come home from the front to rest and the secret agents in the movies take a beachy holiday in between assignments. So I guess I need to learn to trust that I will be safe if I take the armor off for a while.

I became even more painfully aware of my problem this afternoon. I had to go in for some medical testing which required sedation. I was totally out of it and I hardly remember anything about today before 1:30 pm. At one point I woke up to the sound of my son crying, I was asleep in bed recovering as the drugs wore off and after what seemed like 30 minutes of crying I jumped out of bed to investigate. My husband had him in his car seat and he was rocking the seat with his foot. I grabbed my son and marched away with him confident that only I could discover and rectify the source of his tears. Now I hardly remember any of this but from what they tell me I yelled for more than five minutes about how no one could take care of things but me and I would never be able to rest because of it. Eventually they had to talk me down and coax me into handing the baby over and going back to bed for a few hours. So today I learned that drugged up me is even more wary and guarded than regular me. I had apologies to make when I finally came to my senses again. So I struggle with a big lack of trust and this is not the diagnostic end I was expecting from the medical testing I went in for.

I have also become aware of this distrusting nature in every day life. I regularly check to see if my children are breathing while they sleep because I live in fear that they will be taken from me. When my husband and I talk about our future I hear a small cynical voice inside me that whispers, "You're never going to be THAT happy." When I think about letting God lead my future, my thoughts go something like this: "Of course we want to do that in God's timing and in his will, but he's not going to give me what will truly make me happy, so I better start doing some research to make it happen." I say that I trust God, but it's really just lip service. In my heart I believe that if I want it to be good, I have to do it myself.

I know that my cynical, calloused and mistrusting self can't stick around. I don't want her to. I need to go on a journey of unlearning these life-sucking beliefs I have picked up. I know the the truth I need to integrate, but moving it from my head to my heart seems like a painfully long journey indeed. I don't have the road map all lined out and I can't google how to get there. I just have the knowledge that I need to move in that direction.

So I have this little story that helps me with hope, that reminds me of a better way. Any time we can, my family and I go get frozen yogurt, we love the fro-yo. It's fairly healthy, amazingly delicious and the control freak that I am loves that I can do it myself. I was helping my two year old daughter get her fro-yo out of the machine and then I took it away to pay for it and add to it her absolute favorite thing, Sprinkles. She loves sprinkles more than anything else on the planet, so much so that we centered her birthday party around them. Well when I took her bowl away she fought me and burst into tears and had a meltdown on the floor. Her two year old brain doesn't trust that I am going to go and pay for the fro-yo and bring it back, because I know that it will be so much better if it has sprinkles and isn't stolen. Eventually she calmed down when I brought her back her paid-for vanilla fro-yo, covered in sprinkles.

As I watched her eat it one of Jesus teachings came to me, and it's found in Luke 11

11 “You fathers—if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? 12 Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not! 13 So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him."

So if I promise my daughter fro-yo, am I going to show it to her and then not let her eat any? Of course not, I'm going to give her the fro-yo with a mountain of sprinkles on top, because I love her THAT much. I love her to the moon and back, and even on the days when she pushes all my buttons and the ones that screw up the dishwasher as well, I still can't wait for her to get up the next morning so we can do it all over again. I am flawed, hopelessly flawed and I still yearn to see my little girl enjoy all this life has to offer. But I struggle to believe that God wants the same for me and that is an ouch realization for me. Writing all this doesn't fix my issue, it's just a diagnosis. I have to pray that God will help me on the road to recovery. He will, I know, but I have to take off the armor and be vulnerable.