watching my son

I can remember so many times that I have heard someone say about their child, " I was watching my son" and in mind it meant being in the same house, being in charge of their whereabouts, etc.

But right now, I found myself- really and actually watching my son. You are in the middle of the floor in your room surrounded by toys as you often are. You look from one thing to the next, and decide which item you will work on. You pick something up, taste it, twist your wrist in little circles to get a view of all sides of the item and then you taste it again. Then you decide if there is something else to do with it.

Watching you today as you work out things like putting a ring around a little post, takes my breath away. No doubt that this will sound cheesy to me even as I read it back- but being your mom takes my breath away. I think it is true that once a woman becomes a mom, it is like walking through a threshold that you cannot go back through.

Last week there was a horrible earthquake in Haiti. Haiti has been a place of so much poverty for so long. However, this earthquake has been something a person just can't understand. They are estimating deaths in the 200,000 range. That is a number I can't even picture in terms of people. There was a news piece, as there always is, where a young girl was crying out with her arms in the air and saying "mommy, mommy." I literally feel like I was punched in the throat and if I had the opportunity to hold that girl in my arms and have her live with us-- in that moment I would have done so in an instant.

I hope for you so many things. But one is a new found understanding of these kind of tragedies from the book "where is God when it hurts" by Philip Yancey. God does not choose for certain things to happen. He knows in advance what will happen because He is God. But He created the world with two commitments that He does not stray from. The earth will operate with consistent natural laws and people will have free will. These two agreements that He made bring us so much pain that He then gets blamed for them. I am NOT saying that thet people of Haiti deserved or created this but the world does follow consistent natural laws. I hope someday you will read this book. I know I will have many opportunities in your childhood to remember this philosophy and viewpoint of God's place in suffering and I hope to do a good job of teaching you a way to see it. This will be a tough lesson as a mum for sure.