We have a hard time keeping the house clean. That is the main compliant in a house of 2 kids under the age of 5. Life is about learning, creating, experiencing new things, and enjoying each other through the simple joy of play. This is 85% of our time spent as a family. The other 15% is mixed with priorities such as meal times, preparation for bed, church, reading books, family devotions, and the like.
As soon as my kids leave for an extended period of time, like when they go to their grandparents for a few days, it takes me and my wife 30 minutes to clean the house. When they are here, it is as if we are always in a state of cleaning something. And when the kids are gone and I am finally cleaning the house, I feel the grief of one day not having my kids here to beg me to keep playing. I reflect on how fast they are growing and how much they beg me for my time and attention, to put off cleaning and I ask God to be more present. We can’t play all the time, but we have the opportunity to love and care for them as responsible parents through our presence. That is what they want and that is really what we want. We don’t want to miss it.
Parenthood, when you fully embrace it, can be a process of growing in humility and appreciation of simple pleasures. As the house is empty with no kids and my wife and I are picking up the toys and cleaning, it hits me that I want more kids. I want more simple moments together and I want to be stretched more than I am.
Most of my favorite moments with the kids I don’t realize were that meaningful until the day after. It’s the day after when I think back about a small gesture or achievement that one of my kids made and I smile. It is the memory that stays with me and only happens through being fully present in as many moments as I can. These moments make up memories and are what keep me hopeful for future moments. It grounds me in the reality that I am getting older and that life is to be lived one day at a time. I don’t want to miss any stage.
Many good moments in life are like this. We receive praise or find joy in surprising places, not always when we are doing work but as a result of doing it. In order to receive life’s intrinsic pleasures, we are committing ourselves to be present and embrace the stage we are in. This hope of not missing moments to be present is what has us wanting to not be away from each other. We are a family and we deeply care for each other even in the midst of the most challenging seasons and in the most happy times.
It is when my kids leave that I find too much time with myself. The quiet is deafening. I suddenly have plenty of space and not enough work to do. I become lonely. When my friends ask me if I am happy for time away from our kids, my wife and I are thinking no. We have created rhythms that give us space for our family in our normal routines. It makes me thankful to know, that in this season at least, we are creating room for what’s important.
We just had our 4th miscarriage a few days ago. We wait and ask God for more children in a season of hope and expectation. We want our moments to be full and having more kids is one way we ask God for more. Despite the challenges that come and go with kids and the different stages that require different responsibilities, we are deeply enriched when we embrace the opportunities we have before us, whatever they are. We want them to be full and we would rather ask God for a little more space than having too much space and wishing later that we had a fuller life. We know the alternative to filling our lives with people, particularly little ones, is to be alone and lonely, or even worse, selfish and self-consumed.
And this is the challenge with silence. We want silence to focus on what matters to us but we forget that sometimes silence means emptiness. We know what matters to us is not always what is best. So, instead of trying to force our will or our way we work in and with what we have been given and we pray for guidance and clarity. This is how we embrace our identity in Christ, our true identity. This is how, with more kids, we often are able to more fully embrace who we are, when we create margin in our days for what is most important and we don’t just selfishly work our days away in pursuit of the wrong things. We must cut out what does not matter and make room for what matters most every single day. This is the narrative of our lives that we find ourselves in, day after day.
As I have been given more opportunity and responsibility, staying true to myself gives more and more abundance. We want to fill our days with what fills us up. And yet, I don’t really ever know what fills me up in the moment. Many moments come with frustration and often sadness. What clearly worked well and what did not, I am often not the best judge. What worked well is most evident when I look back in reflection over previous weeks, months, and often years in greater submission to God. In the midst of a season, it’s hard to know how we are doing. But the catch is, pressing in to know who I am more and more brings more clarity and confidence in my days. And knowing who I am is knowing that I am connected to God and I am a vessel that life moves through. I am not the source of my life, I am just a conduit through which life flows. Therefore, I get to choose what to do with the life, the thoughts, the words, the feelings, the emotions, and the circumstances that move through me. That is, I get to embrace them with gratitude, sometimes I get to form the moments and sometimes moments form me.
I find the best kind of life is mixed in with both forming moments myself and being formed by something outside of me. For years, I struggled to do the work that I thought I could do to provide real value to businesses. This is what I thought made the most sense based on my skill set and capabilities, but others that employed me did not see it that way. For years, this really frustrated me and angered me. When I finally gave up trying to orchestrate things in the way I thought they should go and began to try to live more open-handedly God started to use me in ways I would have never imagined.
What surprised me is how it happened. It started with gaining an emotional capacity and maturity that I thought I already had but I was blind to what I did not understand. Through some hard personal issues and with my wife’s help, I uncovered some deep rooted issues. Only once I had a frame of reference for how I was co-dependent and needed the approval of others, was I able to truly live more free. And when I live more free, God is able to move through you more freely. I was more open to being formed.