It was bad. I had been home alone for most of the day wrapped in my own thoughts which escalated quickly. “What have you accomplished these last six months? No, Pam, let’s go farther back than that. What have you accomplished in the last year? Wait a minute. What have you ever finished? There are sixteen zillion projects around this house that are just screaming failure! The knitting, the scrapbooking, the design project, the furniture redo, the cookbook fiasco, don’t even begin to look in the closet! Closet… clothes… laundry… PAM!! There is a load in the washer that’s been sitting there stinking. You can’t even remember to finish the laundry!”
Then my poor husband walks in the door from work. “Honey, I have to warn you that I have been in a funk today.” And I proceed to wail into his chest until his shirt is positively soggy. He very wisely says almost nothing while I recite all the convoluted accusations that the enemy has been whispering in my ear that I have taken to heart. I eventually gather my wits about me and follow the sage advice of one of my heroes, Elisabeth Elliot, and I “just do the next thing.”
I head to the kitchen and start dinner. In the meantime, Bo goes to change. I am facing the stove and so have my back to him when he returns to the kitchen with a speaker in his hand. And I hear it…
DUM…da DA da, da DA da. da DUM… da DA da, da DA da. It is the dancy-est tune playing through that little speaker. It starts with my toes and pretty soon my whole being is dancing in the kitchen with my honey and my heart is singing and I am grinning from ear to ear. (While I am trying to keep the dinner from burning.)
I got to thinking, why did that make me so happy? None of my circumstances had changed, except the laundry finally got done. But I realized that in my sinful, sobbing, self-centered state of mind, I had lost touch with who I was and where my identity lay. I was so messed up in my thinking that I had no idea what I needed. If I had put on some music, it would have been something quite holy and probably a bit melancholy. And it would have spiraled me even farther. But my dear husband of 27 years knew exactly what I needed. So often some odd revelation happens between us and we look at each other and marvel, “Wow! After 27 years, we are still learning something about one another.” But in this moment, it so struck me that he knows me better than anyone else walking on this planet.
I realized too that there is One who knows me so much better than that. He knows all the crud that I successfully hide from the world. He knows my desires and aspirations. He knows my failure and sin. He knows my quirks. He knows my ambitions and desires. He knows when I sit and when I rise up. He discerns my thoughts from afar. He searches out my path and my lying down. He is acquainted with all my ways. He knows what I am going to say before a word is even on my tongue. (Psalm 139) And yet, even so, despite knowing all the muck inside me, He calls me precious. (Isaiah 43) And He rejoices over me with singing (Zephaniah 3)
So, knowing the truth, we dance in the kitchen.
Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash
Phoebe looks at me sometimes and I just want to eat her up. She is so adorable and has the longest eyelashes you have ever seen. Seriously… I have to trim them or they get too long. But to get to my point, she looks at me like her life depended on it. And in reality, it does. She is completely dependent on me for her food, cleanliness, safety, security, environment, everything. There is nothing that she needs that she can do for herself. She trusts me to care for her and to be the provider of all good things.
