Taking care of two mobile kids is a study in entropy. Now that he can walk, he loves grabbing random objects and toys around the house and dropping them off in a completely different place. He likes digging into our recycling bin and redistributing empty cartons and bottles around the house. She is always moving toys from one room to another. I'm constantly battling the clutter of plastic kitchenware, books, doll house furniture, empty Tupperware, stray wrappings and stickers.
Life is messy in more ways than one. The day doesn't always go as we predict. They don't always sleep, eat or act the way we think. Sometimes, like today, we find ourselves spent. We're helping to plant a church, which means I show up before dawn to set up the band and play for worship; D gets the kids ready his own and then ushers. We stay afterwards for lunch. We all come home pretty exhausted. And it's darned hard to be patient with each other and two fussy, irrational kids.
I was reading Mary's story to E today and it struck me how messy the whole journey to Bethlehem and labor in a stable must have been. Somehow we have romanticized the whole tableau; turned it into something with cute barnyard animals and soft lights. The last time I went to a barn, it stank. The last time I was pregnant, I had a hard time sitting on the floor of our new furniture-sparse house, much less on the bony back of some donkey. It would have been easy to be grouchy, to wonder why a reservation wasn't made, to think things were going all wrong, when instead it was exactly how it should have been.
So yeah, things are not all perfect around here. There a shoe under the couch because dee-dee fished it out and was walking around with it in his mouth; there is a plastic purple fork on the sofa because I was lying there pretending to be E's patient and that was my "medicine." But Jesus began his life in an unexpected place, in the dirt and hay. I think when he told the little children to come to him, he must have been someone who didn't mind their loudness and clamor, their untidiness and stickiness. So it's okay. Sometimes I get so stuck on wanting the day to go my way, on fighting all the spills and messes, that I forget the point of it all. I forget to be present. This Christmas, I want to be present in the unexpected. I don't want to be so intent on the inn room that I miss the king in the stable. I don't want to be so irritated by the mess and unpredictability that I forget to see my family for what it is and be grateful.
