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<\/a><\/p>\nI awoke this morning to find my bed covered in moaning children, all of whom were covered in alarm and distress about the traumatic and insupportable discomfort of this head cold. One plaintively recounted the filling up of her ear, another the inability to breathe at all, another the pounding headache of death, and so on, through all six of them. They gazed at me in, I would like to say mute suffering, but there wasn\u2019t anything mute about it. On the contrary, each was more than articulate about the horrors of the night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so sorry,\u201d I said. \u201cThat sounds terrible.\u201d
\nThey gazed at me in dismay. Is that it? No more? Won\u2019t I be leaping up to make all the suffering and pain go away? Unfortunately not. In fact, I have increased their miseries a hundred fold because the piano teacher came after all, even though they are all dying. It\u2019s going to be so desolating, lining them up in the ground, lovingly lettering \u201cHere lies a child, killed by a piano lesson\u201d over each one. I will weep and mourn. It will be tragical.<\/p>\n
Today I\u2019m thankful for sarcasm, without which I myself would not, so far, have been able to survive motherhood.<\/p>\n
Not that I enjoy persecuting my children. No more than God probably enjoys persecuting me. But there is some sort of curious fascination to be had in standing watching a child freak out over something, as one might say, non essential. The shape of a certain cup, perhaps, or the way the shoe lace won\u2019t perfectly tie, and so we can never leave the house ever again, because it doesn\u2019t work, and life has ceased to have any meaning.<\/p>\n
I can no longer bear my life, one says, and God looks on in bemused omniscience and says, mostly in the Bible, \u2018Oh yes one can.\u2019 And there you are, stuck and angry.<\/p>\n
Not that all of life\u2019s traumas are equal to a shoelace that refuses to be tied. Death, for instance, far outweighs nearly all the frustrations and horrors of ordinary life. That one was so unsurpassable that God himself came, in great suffering even, to untie the terrible knot.<\/p>\n
\u2018I must be dying,\u2019 I might say, having stubbed my toe on the vagaries of my day. But then, when I might actually be dying, I\u2019ll be more than willing to plunge my head into the sand pit of denial and conclude that everything\u2019s really ok. I make the very small into the very great so that when the very great comes along I have nothing left to cope with it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure this is not what Jesus means when he says you must become like a child to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Observe any number of children writhing on the floor because the paste has run out and you will Know that that\u2019s not what he means.<\/p>\n
Fortunately for most of us, time, which is also a gift from God, produces perspective. You lie back on the floor to wail but then sit up and try the lace again and it turns out to be fine. Your mother stands there and gazes at you, folding your laundry, sardonically congratulating you for managing to pull yourself together. And the next time you maybe don\u2019t make quite as much of a fuss. Or maybe you do. But it doesn\u2019t matter, because God is still God, and your mother is still your mother, and plenteous grace abounds.<\/p>\n
Still though, I\u2019m pretty sure this cold is going to kill Me, even if it doesn\u2019t kill the children. But until then, pip pip.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The trouble is with most of life is that it’s impossible to have any sense of perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2373,"featured_media":5904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-6733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-conversation-with-children","tag-just-plain-sarcastic"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n