Now That I'm Here

Way back when Naomi was around 12, I read something in a magazine. Probably it was just two paragraphs, but it made me all teary-eyed, stuck with me for years, and I often repeated it to women who complained about the messes their children made around the house.

I'll sum it up like this: A woman said she used to complain that every time she cleaned a room, her children would mess it back up. But now she'd decided to stop complaining because someday her little girl and boy would grow-up and move far away and then her rooms would be, and stay, achingly clean.

Oh good grief. The things we do to ourselves! Especially that foolish thing we do, that jumping into future places inside our minds where we have no grace to be yet.

I can't believe I went around for years repeating that story, giving it almost biblical importance. What was I thinking?

Because now, to me, it's yet just one more of those things designed to make us feel that without someone else--in this case, children--Life is empty. Sad. The good times are over. No more. Finis.

Huh! What a lie.

Here I sit over on that other side of which that woman wrote, a place where she had not yet been, but where, I assume, she is now. And in my heart I hope she's accepted that Life is always changing and becoming something different. How it becomes our responsibility to make it into something just as special as what we once knew.

I love my life over on this other side. And perhaps this story returned to my mind because I've been cleaning and my rooms look--not achingly clean--no! But rather, cozily, warmly clean. Happily and Life Is Good clean. And I love stepping down the stairs and discovering, yes! These rooms are just the way I left them. Pretty. Clean. Uncluttered.  

And may I remain grateful that I realize Life is always moving, changing and I need to keep up, otherwise I may get left behind in a dark, morbid sort of place all alone.

But with God by my side in all the changes? Life is, instead, becoming quite the big, who-knows-what's-next? adventure.



******