Family Night Takes Flight
The push of the days, they crash into one another. The busyness speeds minutes into hours, into seasons, and life spreads wing and fies. A new video game, a stop at two stores on the way home from work, homework in three progressions, and I hurriedly add the details of dinner. How much activity can be crammed into one evening, without something spilling over?
The plan was for the work to be done by 7pm to make way for family movie night: the fourth installment of Love Comes Softly. But life often happens to the best laid plans these days. It was 7:45 before we began, and after bedtime by the end. But how else will family time happen, if we don’t just squeeze it in?
The demands and the desires press hard against me and the clock mocks me with its tick-tocking. The toilet overflows, the man-child erupts, the showered girl needs a towel, and a mama simply tries harder, runs faster, to hold it all together.
The other day, we visited friends who had experienced a healing that just may have saved his life. The wife sat quiet beside him, with the golden retriever who thinks he’s a lapdog sprawled across them both. Steve spilled forth his joy, and thanksgiving, and with humbled inability to put words to any more, he spilled the rest from his eyes.
As we listened, I watched a magnificent hummingbird through the picture window behind him. The petite gracefulness nothing short of a work of art. She perched on a branch for a while, then motionless hovering over the necter, then perched again quietly and effortless.
I think of the bird tonight. I have not hovered motionless and perched, effortless and quiet. But I want to be the beautiful bird that sucks necter from life with the poise and artistry. Instead I am an ant, who scrurries helter skelter after the boot drops. Right up and over those who are closest – but in my way, the crazy madness of the ant pile, biting, stinging. The high-pitch is because I’m not breathing from my diaphram. My chest aches, my ears ring, and my shoulders are a tight-rope.
I speak too many words, overflowing like the toilet. And I need Thee, O I need Thee. Every hour I need Thee.
While I mop up the contamination from the bathroom floor, I wonder how I will clean the contamination that overflowed my heart. The words from Haggai that flowed into that heart only two days ago bite and sting my spirit now. Because the impure indeed defiles what is pure when it touches it (Haggai 2:12-13). I have presented my members as an instrument of unrighteousness (Romans 6:13), and sown discord, not peace. I have looked into the mirror and walked away and forgotten Who I am to look like (James 1:23-24).
God disinfects with mercy and grace. Forgiveness, too. And a new day dawning tomorrow. He lifts me up–I am not an ant trampled under foot. And He humbles me–neither am I the hummingbird, beak dripping stolen sweetness. The bird God watches is the sparrow.
And I sing because I’m happy and I know he watches me.
Wow, amazingly beautiful.