You know that moment you wish you could capture in still-frame — just freeze it and frame it and have it within arm’s reach — but you know if you did it might spoil the purity of it all?
I had one of those today, interrupting my mundanity.
One of my littles was struggling again with that same old lie. I see it in her body before her words ever speak it — she slouches when it haunts her. Her eyes half-shut under the weight of those eyelids, hiding her.
Shame is her food: not as good as her siblings, never was as good as her siblings, never will be as good as her siblings. Bad, bad, bad is the tagline of this lie.
So here we were again, sifting through it all — her sifting, me wanting to lift up her little eyes.
Her sister snuck into the background of our conversation, just as we started praying, with this one phrase — my still-frame moment.
“He’s making you new!” she declared with a fire in her eyes, and something clicked in the one in my lap.
When she had moved beyond bad, bad, bad to describe herself, I noticed the phrases she used weren’t her own, they were learned. Mimicked. She’d overheard this same sister in the room saying those very things, about herself, months and years earlier and she was trying them on for herself.
But today there was a different word over both of them — the one who declared it and her sister, who heard it.
My girls were being re-written.
She may not have been able to recall that He spoke this first in His Word — in Revelation 21:5 or 2 Corinthians 5:17 — about them and about Him, but now it was lodged her language. It was hers, to own, that came first from Him.
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Words fill my day.
By 8:15pm, I’m near-crawling up the stairs to tuck them in bed, not on any sort of guard over what might happen between when my feet leave the first-floor hardwoods and hit their worn, old bedroom carpeting. In those short few minutes, I not only hear it, but swallow it: the list of all I missed in just this one day.
She wanted to talk, heart-level, and I brushed her off to keep cleaning. I ignored the prices at the meat counter and walked away with $50 steak for one single night, unknowingly. I barked orders after dinner in lieu of patient training. And I didn’t even finish washing her sheets from this morning — what bed will this child sleep in tonight?
Those few minutes were loaded with words, all aimed at [continue reading over here —->]
