Moments

Yesterday, while Ruth took a nap snuggled against my chest and I couldn't move, I watched the little videos I've made where you piece together one-second video clips from the whole year and set it to a sentimental tune. I started doing this when James was two-and-a-half, so now I can watch the last three years fly by in a total of fifteen minutes of one-second clips. That's quite a trip, let me tell you. Of course the clips can't capture everything, but they capture something, something to hold on to, something to remember the days by. They capture in fast-forward the mountain tops and valleys that make up a life. Sometimes when I look back over a season, a month or a year, I struggle with how to remember it. This year on my 33rd birthday I journaled through some reflections and settled on how hard the year had been. Things like my anxiety, sleepless nights, physical pain, and sick babies loomed large as I stood in retrospect. Yet I could also just as well recall the high points: our babies giggling and tickling each other in perfect, innocent joy. Moments of standing in awe of God's beautiful creation on white sandy beaches, communing with friends over delicious food, worshipping God through the liturgy, tasting the bread and the wine on my tongue Sunday after Sunday and feeling Him near, night after night of family dinners as we light a candle and seek to bring something beautiful out of chaos. 

What makes up a life? Of course Annie Dillard was right: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. And one day is made up of so many things, many hard, many bright, some dark, some painful, but most, beautiful, if you turn your head and look hard enough. And such is this life. Writing helps me pause to see the beautiful and the good, when otherwise I might have just held onto that one-second clip of everyone screaming at the same time in a turned-upside house. But that moment passed, as moments do, and eventually we were all tucked into warm beds despite the cold night, under the roof of an old house filled with life and love and good books, and for the moment, a real-live tree bedecked with ornaments and mementos of precious memories and savored joys. I hope when these "little years" are over and done and all I have to remember them by are some photos, videos, and my own failing mind, I hope I'll remember the truth: that the days were long, and I was struggling against my flesh--and often failing--, but my heart loved this life, loved these babies, loved their daddy. Woke up (most) mornings long before the sun to pause and receive my daily bread and then proceeded through a long series of moments, some worth dreading, but most a complete and utter gift of God. Help me to savor today. Amen.