This is Worth It

Last weekend we ran away to Dewey, Arizona with our family. Getting away wasn't easy. The laundry, the lists, the packing, the laundry, the meal planning. The laundry. And covering Sunday when you're a children's director? Oh, the penciling and erasing and messaging and praying. That not a single volunteer would be up in the middle of the night with a feverish child. And did I mention the laundry?

But it was so worth it.

The t.v. wasn't working, which was fabulous. We played duplo blocks and fed baby dolls with two gentle hearted boys and three of the sweetest girls imaginable. We ate rustic biscuits with homemade sausage gravy and watched rainbows and sunsets. The kids collected grasshoppers and stomped through mud puddles. And we sat with mom and dad Williams and Doug and Erin and realized that the hundreds of hours spent walking the floor with screaming babies, reading Blue Hat, Green Hat 563 times, driving to church even when we couldn't find matching sock...mattered. The boring and mundane...the schedules and rules and broccoli and bedtimes...mattered. The payoff was in moments like this where we could realize, "I like these little people.  A lot!" This is worth it!  

These moments are fleeting and someone will inevitably break the spell, because saintly they are not. But it's still in those brief moments when you get a peek at the grown-ups you hope to spend Thanksgiving with in twenty years.

Saturday we all went to the Heritage Park Zoo in Prescott. Our favorite was the tiger feeding. Before bringing the beautiful big cat back into her habitat, the zoo keeper spread four or five hearty, raw steaks along the rocks and into the trees. She told us that she could not simply pile the food in one place because she had "food aggression". For the first three years of her twelve-year life, her brothers had fought away all of her food. So, if she saw all of us there, she would naturally hoover over her pile and growl angrily at us. 

Something stood out to me. This was nine years later. What had happened to that poor girl still haunted her today. Even after being well cared for these past nine years, what happened to her earlier in life mattered. 

I kept thinking about these things Monday, stopping at the Musical Instrument Museum on our way back home. I 100% enjoyed my boys' company that day. They were learners and listeners. They soaked in the words written and music played. They made connections. And I kept thinking...this matters!

That night, the two boys lay reading together in their much-too-messy room. At 8:00, when it was time for lights out, I happened to be upstairs.

"Good night, Moses,"I heard.

"Good night.  I love you," said Moses.

"I love you too." Daniel turned out the lights.

And it was all so worth it.