All the dishes get done even if all the laundry doesn’t. I wipe down that table top that wobbles on four legs that have been loosely unhinged ever since we had boys. Paper towel and hand smooth over the old paint splotches that won’t come off and the scratches that no one admits to making.

My every day is an ordinary collection of rinse and repeats that every mother knows by heart.

I am not a preacher or a Bible teacher.

I am a collector of stray socks and washer of towels that people keep wiping Spiderman tooth paste traces across. Some Sundays I serve in the children’s nursery and most Sundays I sit in the sanctuary and think what it must be like to have to spend as much time knee deep in Scripture as I spend in lego and toy cars. That is the work of preachers, I tell myself.

On Monday night I think I hear God telling me something else.

I rock a baby and hang up a call on that fun phone with the purple case and I think I hear something. It’s not coming from the finally-quiet-house. It’s coming from somewhere inside of me. I listen and what I hear makes me uncomfortable.

There it is again – the challenge, the invitation – to sink into Scripture and prayer and all that stuff I imagine that’s reserved for pulpit-goers. I swallow slowly. Bible going is easier for me when it’s in the form of a 30 second app on my smart phone. Not when it requires time that could be spent on my own to-dos.

But I hear it again – the insistence that I don’t need to be at a women’s retreat, a Sunday school class, or behind a pulpit to be with the God who sees nothing routine about my routine.

There’s the boy who drives me to distraction with wondering how to redirect in his fiery spirit, the other boy who is growing ahead of me and making me work hard to keep parenting at his pace, and the baby girl who teaches me things about my own womanhood.

There’s the patient man who shares these ups and downs with me.

And here’s the home we share, in between two countries and a collection of far too many light sabers.

I sit at my desk in the corner of an overcrowded play room and open my Bible. Here is church on an ordinary Tuesday morning. There is no occasion, there is only wanting to be with the God who sees me, and away from the fear that pursues me.

“If you don’t know what you are doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help.”
James 1 {The Message}.

Outside the neighbor starts up his mower and a dog barks. Inside I meet the Gardner who wants to, “landscape [me] with the Word….”

The fear shifts. I can smell cut grass.

Seasons are changing.

I wrote this post a year ago. And in the middle of our Book Club as I sense so many of us trying to find the wonder in the routine of motherhood after Monday’s video, I needed to read this post again today. Maybe you did too. You can catch up on the whole Surprised by Motherhood Book Club by just clicking here. And you can pick up your own copy of the book over here.

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