This past Sunday was a beautiful moment for our little family: My husband baptized my two youngest children.
This past Sunday was a beautiful moment for our little family: My husband baptized my two youngest children.
You’ve been there: Whirling into a coffee shop or dinner with friends. Or talking on the phone while your kids fight in the other room (#methisweek) and you try to remember whether you’ve added salt to the recipe you’re cooking, dang it.
But somehow, the person looking you in the eyes, or on the other end of that phone call has the ability to just…
Be there.
So I should probably tell you that generally (weirdly?) I do not go to the doctor when sick. I’ve taken kids for ear infections and all that, and certainly that time when my son’s staph infection on his jaw made him resemble Jay Leno (also weirdly. And yes, I remember writing about the importance of getting your kids’ behavioral diagnosis.
But still.)
As we waltz into December, it’s meaningful to me to look back on this year and ask my soul a few questions. How you doing in there?
David Benner, in The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, writes,
Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God. John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
Those of you who are married: Remember that moment where you piled all those fluffy white layers into the car with tin cans clanking on the back? Or maybe you loosened your tie and pressed on the gas with those rented shoes, rose petals or rice or birdseed flying off the back.
There was something about finally closing the door, muting the noise, and looking at each other: Finally. After all of that craziness, we are married.
It was a little weird. Like, is that it? Stood up at the church, shook a bunch of hands at the reception, and now…my identity is different?
While I was on vacation, my parents were in an accident.
I don’t know where I was, what I was doing. But before seven one chilly Iowa morning, two deer collided with their Chevy–one over the hood, one beneath the car. My grandmother, traveling a safe distance behind them in her own car, slammed into them when my dad hit his brakes. Airbags billowed to life everywhere. Both vehicles were totaled.
I probably don’t need to tell you how relieved that of the three of these dear people, all walked away completely unscathed—not even sore the next day. I am thankful for insurance companies and rental cars and wise engineers (go, airbags!) and the helpers God places around us when bad things inevitably happen on this mortal coil.
Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.
Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy being God to become like God.
Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God
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