Posts Tagged ‘Family Life’

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Déjà Vu

Friday, March 15th, 2013

deja-vu“May I be excused from the table?” my daughter asked.

“Sure,” I said. She ran away from the table, coming back two minutes later.

“May I be excused from the table?” my daughter asked.

“Déjà vu,” I said.

“What is déjà vu?”

“It means that I just experienced the exact same thing again. I lived through the same scene.”

“That happens to me,” said my son. “I dream something, and then it happens. Déjà vu.”

“Really? When?”

He couldn’t think of a specific instance.

Suddenly my husband piped up with a smile, “I dream that my kids will be loud and annoying, and they are loud and annoying the next day. Déjà vu.”

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A No Good Very Bad Day (Giveaway)

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

a-no-good-very-bad-dayI always thought it was weird when friends would tell me that their day was ruined, that they were having a no good very bad day. Days aren’t good or bad, and they can be turned around at any moment. Yielding to God is the way to turn any day around. I’ve had my kids yelling and pushing each other and complaining and screaming, and we stop what we are doing. We ask God to help us walk by His Spirit instead of by the flesh. At every moment, there is something that God would want you to be doing. Yield to God to find out what it is.

This bad day happened to be a Sunday when we were about to back out our driveway to go to church. Our car wouldn’t start. I looked at the despair in my husband’s face, and I felt it, too. We had no money to get the car fixed. We had just spent $800 to get the two cars fixed (the little car wasn’t big enough for our whole family to go to church). My husband told the kids to get out of the car. He opened the hood and sighed. This is not what he had planned to do on a Sunday morning.

As I went up the stairs with the children, I remembered one night when my parents were watching the children, and my husband and I were on a date. I had left my cell phone in the car. I told my husband I wanted to go back to the car to get my phone because the phone was worth more than the car. He laughed. This was an insult to the car, not a compliment to the phone. I said, “I hope someone steals our car, because it would serve him right.” My husband laughed again. “Our car is worth less than what it costs to repair it, so it might as well just be smashed to smithereens.”

“Why can’t I have a car that works?” I heard my husband say when I walked up the stairs that Sunday morning. I told the kids to go to the living room. I asked God what I should do with them, and it occurred to me to do Bible sword drills. Even though my kids knew the books of the Bible by heart, they never found the Bible passages in time for when the pastor read them. My husband told me that I needed to do Bible sword drills with the kids, and I agreed, but we never seemed to have the time to do it.

I had my kids get their Bibles, and I started by reviewing the books of the Bible. Then I had the kids open to the middle of their Bibles. Some of their Bibles landed in Psalms, others in Isaiah. I told them that the Old Testament books before Psalms were to the left, and the books after Psalms were to the right, including the New Testament. I told them to open to the middle, then try to find the beginning of Matthew. Hold that chunk in your hand. Feel how thick the chunk of pages is between Psalms and the New Testament. Now find the book of Judges. Find the book of Jude. That is Revelation, scoot back a page.

The Old Testament minor prophets are so small that you have to flip more slowly in that area. Same with the epistles of the New Testament. I called out many different Scriptures, and the children were quicker in finding the passages. After spending one hour in Bible sword drills, my kids knew their way around the Bible. “See?” I said to my husband. “God always has a reason for the calamities that come our way. It’s good that the car broke down, because now the children know how to find their way around the Bible.”

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The Bird Wouldn’t Have Survived Anyway

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

I was praying one morning out on the back porch, pacing back and forth. The cat came up to me and started pacing, too. She stopped and looked at me, indicating that my walking was pointless. The cat yawned and walked away. She really isn’t a bad kitty.

I continued to pray. About twenty minutes later, the cat came back with a beautiful yellow bird in its mouth. “Put that bird down!” I shouted. The cat dropped the bird. I picked up the cat and put her in the house. Closing the sliding door, I walked over to the bird, hoping it was still alive. It didn’t move. “I hope you’re just pretending to be dead. Get up and fly. Here is your chance.”

I went back into the house, walking into the dining room and sitting in the window seat. I watched the bird. It wasn’t moving.

I told the kids that our cat had just killed a pretty bird. The kids ran to the window to see. They yelled, “Bad kitty!” to the cat. But I answered, “No, she isn’t bad. She was doing what she does instinctively. One of the reasons we got the cat in the first place was so that she could kill the mice. And she’s done a good job of it, too.”

As I walked down the hallway, I heard the sound of the sliding door. I turned around and ran back, asking Rachel if she had let the cat out. “Yes,” she said. I ran to the dining room, looking out the bay window, and sure enough, the bird was gone.

“Sweetheart! Why did you let the cat out? I purposely put the cat inside to get her away from the bird!”

Rachel started crying. “It’s okay,” I said. “The bird was dead anyway.”

“No, it wasn’t! I saw it move!” my daughter wailed. I looked at her. She realized it was her fault that the bird was finished off.

“The bird wouldn’t have survived anyway,” I consoled her. “Birds that are hurt don’t last long.” As she was crying, I asked God what I could teach her so that her sorrow wasn’t wasted. It came to me. “Rachel, before you act, you need to think about the consequences of your actions. You often act before you think. You must learn to think before you act.” She stopped crying and thought about it.

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Guess What I Got for my Birthday?

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

hammockAfter the kids had gone to bed one night this summer, my husband and I sat on the back porch.

“I’ve been looking for a hammock at yard sales for two years. If God wanted me to have one, He would have sent one my way by now. You see, in the dictionary of my mind, right beside the word REST is the picture of a hammock.” I paused. “Maybe the reason I don’t have a hammock is that God doesn’t want me to rest.”

My husband laughed and said, “I think you’ve romanticized hammocks.” He stood up, walked back into the house, and returned two minutes later with a sleeping bag. Throwing the sleeping bag on the grass in the middle of the backyard, he flopped down on it.

I stared at him.

Jumping off the deck, I walked over to where he was, and I lay down beside him. I looked up into the stars and trees.

“Oh,” I said. “This is the same view I would get from a hammock.”

“Exactly.”

Two months later, it was my birthday. I now own a hammock! (I think my husband wants me to rest…)

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Multitasking Burns Your Dinner

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

multitaskingAs I was cooking dinner one night, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the buzz of the dryer, because the load contained shirts that I didn’t want to wrinkle. Meanwhile my husband called and said he was going to be home late because of traffic. I hung up the phone, and my 11-year-old son started talking to me while I said, “Just a second. Rachel! Set the table please!” and I heard a “Yes, Mommy.” Meanwhile my son was talking, but I have no idea what he was saying because I heard the dryer buzz. I set down my spatula from the stir fry to go to the dryer. I quickly and efficiently folded all the shirts as fast as was humanly possible. My head felt thick as my son continued to jabber on and on. I still wasn’t listening to him because… oh, no! Dinner was burnt! I lifted the pan and turned off the burner, looking toward the dining room to make sure that my daughter had obeyed me about setting the table. She had. I set the pan down. I decided to serve the dinner burnt.

We have come to think of multitasking as being efficient with our time. Especially as mothers, we tend to be doing between three to five things all day long. We try to juggle to get everything done, but the truth is that we have forgotten to focus. And we have forgotten how to live in the moment. The saddest part of all this was that the only thing of eternal value in this scenario was my son’s open heart to me, wanting to share something with me. He is soon going to be a teenager, and if I don’t listen to him now, he won’t bother to tell me things in the future, the things that matter. Because what’s important enough for him to say to me, I ought to be able to listen to. But it seems like I don’t have time or brain space. My brain is juggling six things and can’t input more information without dropping something; in this case, burning dinner.

Actually, whenever I focus on only one thing, I get a lot more done. This includes being with people. When I am in my room, sitting on a chair, and my son wants to talk, I can focus great, and we have the most wonderful, deep spiritual conversations. Like the other day he was telling me how frustrated he was with his brother, who would over-react. This would infuriate him, but he had enough self-control not to show his anger. I told him he didn’t need to give in to the temptation to become angry; that God always provides a way out so that we don’t have to sin. “Look for the way out,” I said. We brainstormed ways to do this. Then we prayed that God would transform all of our hearts to help us to overcome sin. You see, I was paying attention to him because I wasn’t multitasking.

Being scatterbrained is no way to live. I was never scatterbrained until I became a mother, and I felt like there was no choice. But we do have a choice. We can choose to do laundry at the beginning of each day so that it doesn’t interfere with dinner. We can ask God how to eliminate action clutter, things that don’t matter that we happen to be doing. And we can learn to be present, to live and breathe, and to do one thing at a time.

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Getting Rid of Snow

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Several years ago Spokane had four feet of snow, and my husband’s shoulders were aching from shoveling our steep hill of a driveway. There were two walls of snow as I would back the van out the driveway. The walls of snow were as tall as my husband, and the snow just kept accumulating.

My parents told us they were coming over, and could we shovel the front steps. So my children and I, having nowhere to put the snow, scooped the snow with buckets, brought it into the house, and dumped it into the hot bath the children had just finished using. The children walked back and forth, bringing the snow into the house, down the hall, and dumping it in the bath tub. It melted instantly in the hot bath. Then we drained the bath tub, and all the melted snow went down the drain.

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Saturday: A Day in the Life

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

a-day-in-the-lifeThis morning my husband took the boys to the Men’s prayer breakfast. After breakfast, they all went on a factory tour of Goodrich, which apparently doesn’t sell tires any more; they make the brakes of large aircraft. The tour lasted an hour, and apparently it was fascinating.

As soon as I got up, I had my cup of coffee while posting a new YouTube video. I answered some e-mails and tried to find an archived e-mail that was important. I finally found it and answered it, since my husband had expressed interest in something I wasn’t willing to do again unless something changed. I prayed about it and sat there.

a-day-in-the-life-2Meanwhile Rachel and I were alone in the house. She asked if we could have a tea party, and I said yes. We made some fruit tea, and she poured it into thimble-small cups and stirred in a tiny spoon of sugar. She did this maybe a dozen times for each of us. “Can we have a truffle with it?” she asked. I set a truffle on each of our tiny plates, and we cut them with our tiny knives.

After tea, we did an art project with one of her Christmas presents. We mixed two different colors of paint and swooshed it onto a large piece of paper, with brushes that looked like mops. One of the three brushes broke, and I wasn’t impressed. She looked like she was about to cry, but I told her they were lame anyway, and let’s dance instead. So I put on some sappy Carpenters music, and we danced around and giggled.

After eating scrambled eggs, she went downstairs to play “Oregon Trail” on the computer. I spent some time in prayer and Bible reading. Apparently the entire Bible is full of commands to help the poor. It’s extremely clear, so I’m not exactly sure why I’ve never heard a sermon on it.

As soon as the boys got home, two of my sons started changing into their basketball uniforms. Then we all left to their basketball game. My youngest son scored his first basket today. He looked so short and little compared to the other players, and I burst out whooping when I saw him score, because I couldn’t believe my eyes.

My in-laws picked up donuts on the way to our house after the game, and we visited for a short time. As soon as they left, I yelled, “Everyone lie down for 45 minutes!” The house was suddenly quiet as we rested. I literally collapsed into bed and felt like a rock. I’ve been sick with a cold and was only pretending to be normal.

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So What’s for Dinner?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Last summer, while relaxing by the swimming pool, my husband asked me, “So what’s for dinner?”

I looked at him and said, “First, as soon as I get home, I am going to shove a piece of bread in my mouth so I don’t feel like fainting. Then I’m going to open the fridge and freezer. Then I will make some food. And then I will serve it to you.”

“Okay…” answered my husband.

“There are at least five meals that I can make in less than 30 minutes based on what is in the fridge,” I explained, naming the different meals he could choose from on my fingers.

“Or we can go out,” he said.

“That would be good, since I’m so hungry I feel like fainting. But don’t say I wasn’t prepared.”

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