We enter the story just after I have spilled hot oatmeal all over one slipper and my maxi skirt and my bare leg… After I’ve vacuumed – the chore my oldest daughter is supposed to do every morning before school… We enter as my next youngest child is explaining to me that MY explanation of How to Wrap the Cord Back on the Vacuum has “unlocked” her understanding. She (the next youngest 👆🏾) also thinks that the actual baby (less than 2 months old) has yet to unlock many things – crawling and walking, for instance; but, that baby has unlocked falling asleep on her own.

The thing is, my next youngest SHOOK my youngest. Yesterday. So her head was whipping back and forth. Witnessing something like that is so scary, it threatens to trigger dangerous reactions. Seeing your child shaking another child that way sets off thoughts and fearful questions.

I’m already struggling. I struggle with fear and with exercising patience. I need patience for my children and their antics and their youthful ignorance and enthusiasm – that which overrules the inhibitions (my and their father’s directives)… I need patience for incessant, obsessive-compulsive questions about things that are little to me.., yet are the world to the little people asking them.

I need patience for gluttonous need – the kind that grows up in the soil of insecurity of change. Chang-es. Many changes.

I need patience for dealing with other people’s need for freedom – freedom that, ironically, burdens me.

I need patience for my body that can’t keep up with my mind and, patience with obligations that eat up the time for keeping up with my plans and want to’s.

I need to access all the patience I have in the only begotten Son of God today as I face a world with fewer trusted friends… Have you heard that saying before – ? – the one about summer friends and winter friends? The Bible puts it this way👇🏾

There are friends who are friends, and there is a friend that is closer than a brother. 

Proverbs 18:24 (Aramaic Bible in Plain English.) I take it to mean, generally, some people are in for the long haul. You don’t have to doubt them or perform for them, and they don’t doubt and question you.

But some folks are part of the fun while it lasts. And life is both – better and worse.

This recurring thought I’m having – about patience – feels like a lesson God is teaching me. A lesson, but without the guilt and judgment teachers usually impose – that is, the ones who aren’t God or, His agents: What feels like a lifetime when you’re waiting (and feeling kind of doubt-y in your faith) is actually many, many times shorter.

In my head, it ties back to another thought I recently had:

The way God loves us is not 🙅🏽‍♀️ like the way we (as adult kids ) are loved.

🙏🏾 God loves us like we love infants 👶🏽 [] the way we love new borns and babies : He loves us before we do anything or, are anything, except amazing creations – creatures who have been formed, life breathed into us…but needing everything.

A nursing baby is most like what we are to God – being fed from Him on demand, crying when we sense lost connection But really, we are the ones to pull away from what feeds us, yet never out of His protective and loving arms 💜

My Post (Facebook, October 8, 5:01 AM CST.) A baby feels like my 25 minute detour away from her (to pay attention to the house or, her siblings or, her father) is a lifetime. She cries like she’s in the cross-hairs of impending destruction.

I kind of laughed inside myself about it as I chided her gently the last time she had such a “meltdown,” but then ☝🏾 It came to me: Don’t I also melt down? Don’t I, too, feel like the sun will never shine upon me directly – as soon as I’m sick, in pain, shaken out of my calm, wise persona by fear or, loss, change, or the inertia that comes by trying to be God when I’m only something He made?

The answer is: Yes. Of course I do.

But this is what I heard God saying in the face of all my mental tossing and turning: Let not your heart be troubled, and do not be afraid. SEE ALSO, 👇🏾

Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God and believe in me.

John 14:1 (Aramaic Bible in Plain English.) And I’m trying not to be afraid, trying to see the glass half full moments – the kiss before the buss ride, the back rub, the chore or homework done without being asked… My son saying that his problem this Friday is: “Momma, I don’t get to hold my sister enough💙”