I am a consummate doer. To a glory and a fault at the same time, I like to get things done. Much of the time I have a plan as to how things should go down. You know the whole “run the day or the day will run you”, I own that phrase. I wake up ready to steam roll the day, more often than I care to admit.
The last few weeks have been full of sickness in my home. Bad sickness. As in bronchitis and almost pneumonia, secondary infections and antibiotics, multiple doctors visits, and nebulizer treatments, my husband couldn’t work for two weeks, sickness. Tomorrow marks 3 weeks of us living this.
As many glorious attributes as there are to having a larger family, sharing sickness among your own small community is not one of them. But we do that. Even sicknesses thats last for weeks. Funny how that works sometimes – we hold our prized possession close yet share our ick freely?
And so my steam rolling has been halted. Because Daddy has been home and fevers abound.
I tried, for a day or two, to keep up the pace, to maintain some modicum of control. The beauty of homeschooling is that you can still do school work on the couch, with a fever, right? But it was all for naught and by the third day I didn’t even try to get the books out.
Why am I so slow at learning the rhythm of grace? A privilege of homeschooling is that I dictate the schedule and yet, this mental schedule has me showing flash cards to a kid confined to the couch. This mental schedule dictates me.
Eventually, I traded it in. I released my stranglehold and sank deep into what life had placed in my hands right now. All six of us home. No company. No running. No co-op or piano lessons or ballet. No birthday parties or friends over. No church services. Just us. Home.
And you know what? It has been a gift.
It has been long bouts of memory making – read alouds on the couch, round after round of Carcassonne
(affiliate link) and Qwirkle. It has been movie marathons, documentaries and sermons, hours of sitting on the back porch chatting, soccer in the yard with healthy few and time to do all the things we often struggle to find time for because we’re so busy sticking to the schedule.
It’s not realistic to completely and permanently ditch the schedule with a family of this size. There are lessons and practices, times tables that have to be learned and recitals and programs that we are committed to.
But if nothing else, the long weeks of sickness have taught me to embrace the rhythm of grace. Changes in life, in our marriages, in our children, come gradually and yet, rapidly. Next week, it’s something new. Ages and stages press in hard and we’re dealing with this kid who won’t sleep through the night, a husband who is overworked and tired, attitude from the pre-teen that comes with no explanation, and friends that seem distant. It’s hard, I get it, I promise.
But you know what I think the answer is? More often than not it’s grace – a whole hearted seeking of the good, a leaning in to the now, a dying to self – my plans, my schedule. It’s embracing the time we have, capturing the moments for what they are, an opportunity to serve, an opportunity to be, an opportunity to embrace what really matters most.
There is beauty here, even in the weeks of sickness. And mostly, it looks like me learning to embrace the rhythm of grace.
