Moments

"That’s it--I’m quitting. I’m quitting being a “people pleaser”—not today, but maybe tomorrow."

Thus said Brenda one recent evening, when someone had thrown her a curve ball. We both laughed when ten minutes later, she decided that she would do what had been asked of her after all--she said she had just needed time to adjust mentally to a change in what she'd been expecting.

Turn the clock back eight years and she is a young mother of a one year old baby and nine months heavily pregnant with her next. She's tired--and she's rocking the baby--Tiffany-Amber--to sleep on her shoulder in the dark kitchen. Louis Armstrong's rich gravelly voice is singing his well known song, Mac the Knife.

We all knew that album--The Best of Louis Armstrong--by heart when Brenda's girls were babies. It was such good "baby rocking music." Brenda had it down to a science--by the time Mac the Knife started, Tiffany-Amber would be relaxed into that floppy armed, dead weight on the shoulder that meant she could soon be put into her crib, blissfully asleep. On this particular night--just at that moment--her friend who was staying with us at the time, walked into the kitchen and flipped on the light--to talk! It's one of those "moments" we laugh about now.

Another "moment" a few years later. Brenda is teaching now at the Montessori school her girls attend. The way Brenda describes it--"God opened a door today - He didn’t just open it but swung it wide on its hinges and rolled out the red carpet. A parent came to me and told me, “I’ve told my child to come to you to talk about God and Jesus, because I know you know and you have kids, so I figured you’d be able to explain it to him.” There are no words to describe the sense of God being all over this moment!

But the moment I remember best of all is the moment the nurses said to me, "It's a girl." This was 35 years ago--before the days of the routine ultra-sound that means most couples know the sex of the baby they're expecting. We had a wonderful little two year old boy already, who never stopped talking--Peter. We would have been so happy with another son--but the moment I heard that we had a daughter and they laid her on my stomach, my eyes filled with tears and in my heart I treasured all of the special moments that lay ahead with this precious little girl.

Psalm 127:3 (New Living Translation)

3 Children are a gift from the Lord;
they are a reward from him.

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