It’s been so very long

Is anybody out there?  I’d love to get back into writing regularly.  

There, I’ve stated my intention, I have a lot of those.

Which reminds me that I recently I signed off a letter to a friend “Bless you and all your efforts and intentions” she loved it, I was in transports of delight that she “got” it!  As a mother of three, writing to a mother of three it came straight out of my heart, from my own struggles, as a benediction to her.  

As mothers we have so many good intentions, don’t we?  I’m not a great cook but I can tell you that I put my heart into almost every meal I make, hoping, and deeper yet praying, that my children’s mouths will be delighted by it and their bodies nourished and revitalized by it.  Well, inevitably much of the prepared food ends up in the bin (as the English so cleanly put it), or stored in the refrigerator where certainly I will be the only one eating again.  That is so frustrating to me!  Sometimes it eats at me (no pun intended) and I want to force feed them or send them to bed early or something.  I never do and I never will, but I do pray about it.  I tell the Lord I’m doing my best, doing what I deem to be the right thing morally, spiritually, why can’t they just be angels and eat the darned healthy food?  So much effort, so much intention went into it.  Not only the shopping, storing and preparing of the food, but the research into what’s healthy for their bodies, too.  

Thinking about this situation with some distance from its occurrence (I’ve been on hiatus, this is my fifth day, more on that later), I am content with the way things are, but curious if there’s an insight that might shed a ray of light, the kind of ray that proves to be fresh, Godly perspective which always enlivens my passion wherever it’s cast.  

Sometimes it seems that a mother should be told, before she becomes a mother that her work is very necessary, but that very much of it will seem wasted, very much of the time.  She should then be encouraged to take heart, don’t look back and keep moving forward!  And if there’s one thing we can do about the situation to make it less frustrating (this very well may turn out to be the ray of perspective I hoped for!) that would be to “enjoy our work under the sun,” as King Soloman suggests as the only way to choose to live that is not “a chasing after the wind.”  So, could the answer really be? . . .  More effort?  More intentions?  I think it just might be.  Actually, without ever having articulated it before, I think that’s what I have done!  And I think that is what has kept me going, passionately.  

When the real, intense challenges of choosing to truly and thoroughly raise my children started to expose themselves to me, there were times, periods of time even, when all I could think about was finding some other important thing I should be doing with my life.  This so as to avoid the tremendousness of the reality that this job I had undertaken in becoming a mother would require every ounce of every part of me and so much more that wasn’t there yet, that “more” I would have to grow and cultivate by God’s loving guidance, if I chose to do it according to my deepest convictions.  To me, there is no other way.  

Blessings on our efforts and intentions might just be enhancements to our work then, what do you think? New, healthy recipes, the discovery of the mop system we can tolerate, the quest for a fascinating history curriculum for our first-grader, so that we don’t lose interest ourselves, a clothesline to add to our laundry chore so that we get outside for receiving the gift of the birds’ songs, the breeze and a bit of quiet offered by our loving shepherd.  I think so.  If we can add these or similar enhancements in order to revive our passion for our work under the sun, then I don’t think all of our wasted work will matter so much to us anymore.  And let us never forget that God sees and delights in every iota of our efforts and intentions!  If you have found particular blessings on your own efforts and intentions, will you share them here, please?

Thank you for reading, in the spirit of J.D. Salinger I’d like to offer you a bouquet of parentheses ((((()))))  Lovely!