Life happens in layers.
We aren’t always told this. Maybe because much of the time we don’t notice, don’t realize, don’t know how to name it.
“The days are long, but the years are short” is a perfect capture. I don’t miss stumbling about at night with an infant or toddler. I do miss baby grins and giggles.
I don’t miss wrestling car seats or coat sleeves. I do miss watching littles on bikes and tire swing.
I don’t miss schoolwork and schedules. I do miss the creative play and companionship of my seven and ten-year-olds.
The bigger question for me now has long been this….
How do I take the longing and the missing from yesterday and apply it to the gratefulness I want to carry for today?
When the mundane of today feels long, how do I grasp the good in it? For the years are short, and tomorrow has not guaranteed its arrival.
Life layered together. Each layer containing the lovely and the languid. The hopeful and the heartbreak. Despair and delight.
It’s inescapable. Ups and downs, mountains and valleys, failures and successes.
We spent last week in Colorado and we celebrated Two of the Very Best Things to Ever Happen to Me.
Those babies I was stumbling around at night with? They’re my young adults now…19 and 22. {still will always somewhat be “my babies,” cliche as it is}
Layering can become a masterpiece. A frosted cake layered to perfection.
An oil painting with detail, textured and crafted.
A story, unfolding, revealing each event.
Layering can provide safety and warmth and adventure when bundling up to brave 3 degree temperatures.
Layering can provide a delicious meal, cheese bubbling up and around meat and potatoes and gravy.
And layering can be “a shoot fastened down to take root while attached to the parent plant.”
And then I think it looks like a transplanting, a growing, a rooting into a new layer of life.
A giving of gratitude for grace upon grace. A hungering for and a pondering of all these things in my heart.
A layered life. Shot through with sparkles of gold among the strata of the very ordinary.
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