Physically, for I did a P90X (a home fitness type of workout) workout this morning after taking over a week off.
Emotionally, for tomorrow marks the 3 month mark of deployment, and as I mentioned just two weeks into this season, I'm ready for it to be over. Just simply and honestly, ready for him to be home.
Emotionally, for today was a day filled front to back with people, which was so fun and so beautiful and life-giving, but can also leave you feeling exhausted. Do you know what I mean?
Emotionally and mentally, for Tirzah and I had an intense battle of the will this evening over the dinner table and it left us both weary and exhausted.
So I write to you, this night, this Manna Monday night, from our bedroom. Our bed, in all of its beauty and coziness and purity, has become my new favorite spot in our house. I spend my first waking moments here, with my tray laden with coffee, flowers, milk, sugar, Bible, and journal. And I spend my last awake moments here, with a book, the computer, and a cup of tea. I write to you with my first mug of marigold tea from our garden. It smells delightfully earthy and tastes much the same, I actually am quite enjoying this cup. I write to you wearing a black sundress with Daniel's green and black checkered flannel shirt, for I so desperately want it to feel like summer and yet instead it is cloudy and in the 60's. And this shirt, his shirt, still holds his smell and it feels like home.
It always seems to be, upon recalling during a Manna Monday, that His provision is a bit mysterious. For His ways are indeed higher than our own. And it was a mysterious type of provision yet again today, tonight actually, while Tirzah and I battled. Often times too, these family battles are over mysteriously small things. Tonight, it was a grape. She had not eaten much dinner and I told her that she had to eat one more of each item off her plate: one more piece of grilled cheese, one more roasted carrot, and one more grape. This fruit in which she delighted not even a week ago, was somehow disgusting to her. She would continue to cough it up and spit it out. Or she would shake her head no or tell me no. She would drop the grape on the floor or she would roll it around on the table. All the while, intense and hot tears are flowing down her soft cheeks and she looks even more pitifully blotchy with each cry. I stood my ground and continued to tell her, through different moments of discipline, that she would not leave the table until she had eaten the grape and with each new trick she tried, I simply gave her a new grape from the fruit bowl.
And yet in reality, it wasn't about the grape. Is it ever really about the grape? It was about obedience. It wasn't a hard or a painful thing for Tirzah to eat the grape, but she did not want to in the least. I was determined that she should. For it is good for her to finish her dinner and eat a good amount and it is good for her to understand obedience. Tirzah has, for the most part, learned obedience quickly and has an obedience-inclined heart. But she is also a very spirited little girl, and as her mother I do understand that she must be trained well, that her spirit might be a beautiful display of the Lord's splendor and not an ugly display of self and self-will. As Elisabeth Elliot writes in The Shaping of a Christian Family: "Parents are given the delicate task of training an imperfect and highly impressionable child who is not their "property" but is entrusted to them for a time, that they may curb the natural tendencies which are useless or destructive, and guide him instead to God" (pg. 124).
The Lord provided in these moments. And it seems so easy to write about them now, but in the moment, it just seems that your heart races and the cries are so magnified and you simply just want to raise your voice. How is it possible to discipline from love and not only from anger or frustration? And it was there in those moments, that He provided. Our nightly ritual is to read a short story from the Bible and to sing a hymn together. While Tirzah was still crying and still debating over her grape, I read the Bible and I sang and I closed in prayer. And I really did feel softened towards Tirzah. I understood that I needed to calmly explain to her what the "larger" situation was about; I understood that she needed me to be calm, gentle yet firm, and not fiercely contorted in frustration. I gently stroked her arm and talked with her; soon enough she was sitting with me at the table, embraced in love and gentle encouragement, and that was when she without hesitation or complaint, ate and swallowed the grape. The Lord provided a way for me to see the truth in why Elisabeth Elliot quoted her father when he said that discipline is a "balance of both Law and Grace" (pg. 182). Indeed there was a law: that the grape was to be eaten. But that didn't mean that I couldn't show tender love and mercy to Tirzah and help her to follow that law. As parents we have the awesome responsibility of standing in the place of God to our children, or in essence, pointing the way to Him. We are to be like Him to our children: their refuge, their strength, their help. And through His mercy tonight, I was able to see the difference in the attitude of my heart when I was disciplining simply for control and disciplining for her good. It was good and right and God-commanded for Tirzah to obey me, (which if anything brings a parent to her knees, is it not this? Most times I don't even know what to do and she is supposed to obey me??), but it is also good and right and God-commanded for me to train and nurture her in love and to be her help.
Does any of this make sense? My head still feels like it is swimming with thoughts and with emotions and with trying to understand the magnitude of the task the Lord has blessed us with. The simplicity of it being: I am so thankful to the Lord for providing a situation where I was able to see so vividly the differences in my own heart and my own attitudes when disciplining through anger and a mind for control instead of through love and with a mind for her good. And I am certain of this, that it will happen time and time again. But I will close with yet another thought from Elisabeth Elliot:
"Do not be dismayed!... never think it impossible. It is always possible to do the will of God. Begin to be ready to do... Waste no time wondering if you can do it. The question is simply Will you? Your weakness is itself a potent claim on the divine mercy (see 2 Corinthians 12:10) (pg. 214).
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