and now back to your regularily scheduled programming.

it never fails. life sweeps you up in the grandest and most beautiful moment, only to dump you out into daily reality again. new parents go from the bliss of counting tiny toes in the hospital nursery to staggering around at 3 am trying to find diapers/wipes/bottles/something that will make baby quiet and sleepy. kids go back to school and come home dumping homework and permission slips and pencil shavings onto a peaceful kitchen table, creating chaos out of thin air. dad gets sick with "whatever is going around the office" and disappears into a cave of quilts upstairs, perhaps never to be heard from again. and the tired mom sighs, sips her coffee and slips with bare feet into the car, driving her daughter to school after having a useless, but passionate, argument about breakfast foods.

great writers and thinkers of faith, ranging from de caussade (17th century) to c.s. lewis (20th century), would say that these are the moments when God truly speaks... in the insignificant happenings of every day that add up to a whole life. beuchner writes, "it all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. our days are full of nonsense and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks words of great significance - not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. and the words he says, to each of us differently, are ... be brave... be merciful... feed my lambs... press on toward the goal."

so today, this tired mom chooses to care for her sick husband, even though she'd rather have someone take care of her. i choose to relax and let go of arguments over toast, to go slow through the day and find the small things i can do - it will definitely be a day of small things - to create peace and grace in my home and my family. and maybe in the midst of the chaos and nonsense i will hear a whisper of something ...