I'm smack dab in the middle of a bath fight. A wet and naked three year old sits on me, the laptop precariously balances in my left hand, and a screaming match is being had over two nearly identical yellow cars.
Just a typical Wednesday night with the wee three...
We appear to be in a season of non-movement. Things are happening, to be sure, but it feels like we're frozen here in time while the rest of the world chugs right on along without us.
The leaves are changing, the sky darkens and threatens, people are moving house... and we reload the dishwasher, wash chubby bums, heave laundry from friend's house to friend's house, waiting.
I wrote before about the women's brunch, about Elizabeth and the impossible and being called to wait. I shared with them about the time of rest, of just being with God, not necessarily doing for God; about how He meets us here and speaks within the silence, filling the empty spaces with grace. Great, life-affirming stuff there. The ladies loved it, sharing their own stories of waiting with me.
[i pause to yell at the naked toddler.]
We ate cinnamon rolls and we prayed. I thought, "Yes, Lord, I'm finally learning a thing or two."
But today, I want to move. Be moved. I don't really want to wait anymore. Two and a half years (or 4 years, wait - no - 8 years...) is too long. I'm ready now. We're ready. Can't we go, yet?!
He speaks to me in the silence again, waking me up before dawn, calling me. He lays me down beside Asher (in his new toddler bed, from which he can break free at any moment), giving me nothing to do but talk it out with Him, give it up to Him.
“You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God,” writes Lauren Winner in Still, via a fourteenth-century English monk. Small scraps of time, of movement, of a long obedience in the same direction.
We are moving.