Perspective...

What a day. I ain't going to sugar coat it. I’m a suck and I get grumpy often out of my own selfish pursuits. It’s me me me, and when there's some additional time I’ll deal with you, you and you but probably not today cause I’m busy.

Sunday, was a day of giving of me. T was putting in a long day at the local hospital tending to a raft of people afflicted with the great modern menace: cancer. You would think that this alone would put things into perspective, and rightly so, but it sadly desensitized it is just normal.

Let’s go, C-fresh gets up early and it's go go go. No times for workouts, no time for reading, just time for breakfast and thankfully coffee…sweet glorious coffee. There should always be time for coffee. We go to church where I pull short straw on nursery duty in the Toddlers, yes those snotty little munchkins. I have been dreading this for weeks. This would be the first time since in about 15 years and somehow I still seen it as an affront to my freedom. There was a baptism that day to add to the numbers of yardapes monkeying around. I'm not going to lie or stretch the truth, childcare is not my forte.

I love my son. I love quiet. I love structure. I love. But the fruit of the spirit is love joy peace patience kindness gentleness and self-control. This sentence from Galatians is in the singular for good reason. You can’t have the spirit and only have love…it’s a package deal. I like to think that I can have varying degrees of each, lots of some, little of most, but I don’t entirely believe that to be true. I would argue that if I had all of them mastered I would be vain, but that would go against most of them, so I resort to determining that if I had all in equal portions, I would be God. I am a work in progress…but back to the day at hand.

So Sunday goes on, we made it through the nursery duty, it went alright, I got cuddles from a little girl who someday, God willing, will marry little C-fresh. Chances are decent as he confided in me his 3 criteria for a wife : 1. She must be older, 2. She must be blonde, and 3. She can’t be mommy. Oh to be young and naive again... I have some work to do to show him the errors of his current criteria.  #3 is good but the other 2 are entirely superficial and shallow. 

We got home, attempted lunch and put the boy to bed as meltdown ensued. He decides a nice long nap is not in order however and that he's going to power through. K comes over and we play guitars for a bit, but C wants to play his guitar, which happens to be my guitar. This really is a sweet moment we enjoy often, he likes to hold the string so they make no noise and eat my plectrum.

Ok next, we play, C-fresh discovered that all drawers are made to be emptied, this is fun. Scissors, ice cream scoops, combs, whisks, knives are all fun. There are always more drawers to empty and more fun to be had in every drawer. We read bear on a bike 18 times. Perhaps it wasn’t 18, could have been 17 or 19 but after 4 times is anyone really counting. He pulls all the cords out of the walls, something he stopped doing some time ago. Decided we better get out of the house, we go for a short cold windy walk with the Monster. Come home and put him down for nap number 2, two is normal, 2 is good, 2 is great even. 5 minutes, crying, ten more crying. Alright, no reading for daddy, let’s play some more. Every drawer is emptied again, cords pulled out again, crankyness is running rampant, anything taken from him is greeted with a meltdown.


Plan A to go to night church is about to go the way of the do-do.

Plan B is enacted – feed him dinner, which he didn’t eat bath him and put boy to bed, bath time is a disaster. getting him dressed for bed is a complete gong show but at 6:24 all is done and he's in bed! Daddy is exhausted.

Time to cook a gourmet meal for my T....look in freezer, retrieve cardboard pizza.

Sunday was not a day of rest. But it’s time to plan for the coming week now. I send a text to ask a neighbour if they can take our Monster on Monday as we are both working and they have a similar monster. Response is almost guaranteed to be yes, it’s always yes. Proven fact that 2 monsters are better than one.

Response: "No, sorry there has been a death in the family" What, I got this excuse 3 weeks ago? Continues... "T probably knows, happened last night at the JCC, my niece"

This short fragmented sentence, put my whole day into perspective. Loathing and washing my selfishness of me me me came to an abrupt stop. The niece, is 3 years-old, she is a sweet little child whom i have met a number of times. Our friends often have her and her brother, also named C-Fresh, over on the weekends as her dad works.

She was a shy little girl, she was sweet and innocent child born into a broken world and an equally broken family. As I come to value my family more and more, I feel the pain for others whose families are falling apart. My heart for others is growing, maybe not three sizes in one day but little by little day by day.

This little girl had it rougher than she deserved and i believe has been spared from future hurt and pain. The second law of thermodynamics states that “we are in a continuing state of entropy” or that chaos is not constant and cannot be reversed. This seems the way of our world and is hard to refute. There is so much pain, disorder, inequality in the world that it’s hard not to resort to cynicism just to cope with it all. I’m not sure in all this how God treats little ones of unbelievers; it is a distressingly tough question. As I see the joy in my child’s eyes as he explores this big world, I know that there is a sense of great wonder awash over him.

I think he gets it, inherently we all know God exists and we all long to be home with him. To leave this chaotic disordered mess behind and live in true peace, with our true family and our true Father. I am left with a knowledge although evil will take some, the evil we experience here on earth is small and fleeting compared to the love of our Father in heaven, who gave us his Son as a perfect sacrifice of atonement for our sins, to live the life we could not live and die the death we could not die so we can live the life we could never imagine. The question is not "What good can come of this?" but "Will we see the good that comes of this?" Question not whether it will happen, for it will happen, the only question is when. And that is not for us to worry about.

Next time on a clear night, look up at the moonlit sky, stand in silence and gaze at the awesomeness and beauty beheld in the heavens.

Revel in the wonder.

God is still God, God is still good.