09-13-2007
Real Life
By Renae
Sometimes I get frustrated by the sacrifices required to be a mother, wife, and home school teacher. I rarely get time to myself until after sunset, but staying up late to enjoy the quiet makes me tired with a propensity towards grumpiness no amount of coffee can remedy. My hobbies are stuffed in closets never to be seen. Most of my conversations begin with the question, “Why?” or “What?” and do not end until I say, “Let’s have a snack.” After serving apples slices, I clean up the salt my youngest used to “finger paint” the table while my son runs around asking questions again.
Living amid confusion and chaos is common for mothers; however, what we do has a higher purpose.
The most basic place of our sacramental living is in our marriages and homes and families. Here we live together in well-reasoned love for everyone around us. Here we experience the sacrament of the present moment…
C. S. Lewis wisely observed, ‘the great thing, if one can say it, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course what one calls interruptions are precisely one’s real life–the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.’ Streams of Living Water by Richard J. Foster
This is my real life and it is good. Wiping little noses, answering questions all day every day, reading Winnie the Pooh over and over, and bringing cups of water to my children, after they have been put in bed, are privileges in the eyes of eternity.
Julie, thank you for sending me this quote.
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