October 11, 2011
The Daily Paws
You can’t really see it in this picture, but Bear’s shirt has a picture of a dog delivering a newspaper called “The Daily Paws.” I love it because I’m realizing that Bear is my “Daily Pause:” taking care of him, particularly when he needs to nurse, forces me to pause for a minute, which I think is more valuable than I realize.
The other day right after Adam left for work I got a call saying someone might want to look at the house. So far Adam has (miraculously) been home every time we’ve had a house showing, and I’ve been dreading the first time I have to get the house perfect and get Bear and the two dogs out of it all by myself. When we put the house on the market I emptied out our storage ottoman in the living room so I could throw stuff in there in a pinch (can I just say how stressful it is to not even be able to shove things in closets, let alone close doors on messy rooms? Thank heaven for that ottoman!) I now measure the cleanness/messiness of our house in terms of how many ottomans the mess would fill up. Haha! Thankfully the house was only about one-half-ottoman messy, but I needed to do cleaning (bathrooms, floors, etc), so I was a little panicked.
About halfway through my cleaning Bear woke up from his nap and wanted to eat. Panicked though I felt, I still told myself that he is the most important thing and sat down to feed him. Pausing in the middle of panic seems counter-intuitive, but I think it’s probably a really good idea. I’ve written before about how I love nursing Bear because it’s one of the few times I’m sure I’m doing the most important thing right at that moment. Having an immanent house showing definitely tested that theory, but I stuck to it, and I was glad I did because I was more calm in the end, anyway. Pausing to take care of him also gives me time to think and time to pray. I think I’ve done more praying since he was born than probably any other time in my life.
I know that as Bear gets older and stops nursing it’s going to get harder and harder for me to take a “daily pause” with him. He’ll be running around and we’ll probably have more kids and twenty activities I’ll want to do in order to give them “every opportunity” and make myself feel like a model wife/mother/Christian/missionary. But it’s a lesson I don’t want to forget: I can, and need to, take time to pause and just invest in and enjoy Adam and our kid(s).
It’s also a lesson I need to learn on a spiritual level. We all need time to pause and invest in our relationship with God; He instituted Sabbath for that very reason, but we Americans are very, VERY bad at pausing. My Sundays (or any other day) aren’t always truly restful, refreshing, and renewing. I think they (and the rest of my life) could be more so if I would make pausing and focusing on God more of a priority. Reflection, meditation, quietness, and listening prayer are all spiritual disciplines that are under-emphasized and in my case seriously under-practiced. I’d like to read something about them, if anyone has any book recommendations. An excellent book about rest in general is called The Rest of God, by Mark Buchanan. I think I need to reread it! (Oh, and I just saw he’s coming out with a novel about David. I am SO EXCITED!!)
But for now, I sure am treasuring my daily pauses with Bear. I never would have thought the business of motherhood might teach me to pause, but I hope it does. I may need to frame that onesie when he grows out of it….
Watermarked One 