I Dance

Many days I feel inspired and ready. Awake and prepared. I seek adventure, activity. I bring out the paints, the glue, the baking tins and the food colouring!!!
We walk, we sing. The house *feels* ordered. My list is checked. By the end of the day my human desire to achieve, control, be strong and have all the loose ends tied up is fulfilled. I feel adequate, I feel good enough. This is my measuring post.
But then are some days when… well, I just don’t measure up to this measuring post *I designed and made for myself* The housework is muddled and feels as though less has been cleaned, tidied, polished or vacuumed than before the day begun. Children are sick, or grumpy, or clingy. I am not focused, inspired, organised or even completely present! Vagueness blurs the definitions of what I try to *be* and what I have tried to *create* and *maintain* This idealised or *idolised* vision of a *perfect* wife, mother, homemaker, servant of God etc…etc…….
A day like this can feel like I am trying to painstakingly unknot a tangled ball of wool only to end up in the tangled ball of wool!

I feel my inadequacy and my flakiness and I get impatient. The dust I rarely notice on the skirting boards suddenly glares at me. Becoming more important than the rest my body requires or the child that clings to my thigh.
Yet, oddly I have begun to see that the *muddled* blurry days are trying to show me something. They are in fact a gift.
My failing is not, in *not* living up to my own expectations but by prioritising them over what really matters most.
What is God trying to show me on days like these?
Maybe he is simply asking me to relinquish control and be still. To rest in His love, to take His yoke, to accept His peace, to allow His beautiful grace to restore my soul, beside still waters, upon greener pastures.
On days like these I have found that I find peace when I take the time to simply read more of His word, pray more, concentrate more on the cleaning of “the inside of the cup” than the outside.

Yet also accepting when there are still a few stains at the bottom from my stubborn resistance :0) It’s okay, I’m learning.
So on days when a cloud hovers over my resting instead of clearing a path for me to walk forward. I'll find myself hearing the words “Be still and know that I am God” In the whisper over and over in my heart there is a well of water that is living.
Even though I want to rescue myself from the mire, God simply want’s me to wait and be still. To feel the soft earth under my bare feet for a time.
To think on the heart stuff.
Humans are creatures of both action and contemplation.
On days like these the Lord simply wants me to sit at his feet as Mary did.
Slowly I find myself reaching out, finding peace, quietening, cuddling little ones under blankets, eating something simple instead of an elaborate dinner, forgetting about bath time, singing songs. Not pushing it.
Like hand writing a letter to a friend. Not an email. Nothing functional or efficient just a little piece of poetry. A scribble with a pencil on a new sheet of paper. It doesn’t even have to make sense.
And so I think it’s okay.
Times in life like this, or when I’ve been pregnant, nursing, looking after lot’s of small children, sick, or overwhelmed, or simply just unable to see my way through, all give me a chance to reflect.
I think my children need to know that I’m not perfect, that I also need to retreat, at times, I need time, need help and also need forgiveness too. A cardboard cut out, forever smiling Mummy is not real, not humble and not healthy. I cry sometimes, they cry sometimes. We’re all human. I think children need to know it’s okay to feel a whole spectrum of emotions. Emotion is good.
The beauty is in embracing it all. The dirt and dust we have been made of by God’s hand as the seasons bring life through their changes.

“A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.”
(“ A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance”)

So I’m dancing. To the tune of dolls house pieces on the floor, books upon the unmade bed, the smell of banana bread baking in the oven to have warm and spread with butter for lunch, As I write this the soft snoring of my two little ones resting. A friend with a gift of a picnic basket in the back of her car. My four year old making her bed this morning so proudly and me smiling at the bumps in the duvet and the dog-eared sheets.
To the music of a life, messy as it is, being lived!

I dance.