For the last week, I have felt as though I was swimming with leaden feet in a swamp of fog. An icky, dark, menacing heaviness that weighed me down both in spirit and in body. Quite like King Midas, everything I seemed to touch turned from good to bad.
Well, at best, from average to worse.
Yesterday I picked up raisins from the same spot my kids ate grapes just a few days before. With my housekeeping, it seems I can turn would-be wine into...shriveled mush. Yay, me!
The same day our music teacher emailed me that two of my kids were very disruptive during the other's lesson. Now I've not only failed to produce prodigies but I'm also apparently inept at teaching them total-silence-and-absolute-selfless-love by the age of 7 and 8 respectively.
The day before yesterday my husband informed me that our son lost it, big-time, while I was away for the weekend. Or was it because I was unable to manage him from 300 miles away?
Today when I went to load the washer I discovered forgotten laundry from who knows when. Science project anyone?
Yes, it was one of those special weeks, where I could do no good and every attempt fell far too short.
Every aspiration ends in devastation. Any effort flops into failure.
Can I get a witness??
In moments, temporary or,at times, ever lingering, my feelings tend to override the truth about my security, of who I am in my Savior. The truth is that I am not what I screw up, I am more than a semi-soggy mildew mess. I am loved, accepted, and counted worthy of this calling as mother.
Despite my weakness, in spite of my pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps pride.
Today I awoke to misty shadows floating gently above the earth outside my window. Yet when I opened my eyes to the light of my Father's love letter to me, I found warmth and sonshine, the glorious reminder that He is sufficient for my weakness, able in all my inadequacies.
My chocolate chip cookies turned out a bit cakey this morning and the breakfast dishes didn't get cleaned up until lunchtime. But I found the strength to take my kids to the skate park and, while I watched, tucked in stray strands of hair that danced in the kisses of the wind.
And I was reminded that there will be days of "light and shadow and oh, the joys and the sorrows! Yet will He bring dark to light, yet will he bring day from night!*
Shadows shrink back in the light of His word, enduring only for the night but joy comes in the morning...
*Lyrical reference from this song, oh! what a beauty!
