Gifts for Dust

My mom gives gifts as smoke rises upwards. Some days I would come home from school to find a new shirt lying out on my bed or a stack of 'new' 50-cent thrift store pants for me to sort through. I remember when she handed me the first clue in a treasure hunt that lead to me to my very first set of eye shadow. Mom prepares for Christmas and birthdays months (and months and months) in advance. When I went away to university, I received far more care packages than anyone else I knew, and those bits of home meant the world to me, a prairie girl transplanted to the mountains and studying my bleary eyes out as I was testing my wings. And now that I am living in Seattle with her grandkids, her momentum has not waned. I mean, we even received a package to commemorate Canada Day, complete with Coffee Crisp bars (yes!) and pencils brandished with Canadian flags.

One card I received while in university contained a note pointing me towards Psalm 103, and it has been a favourite passage of mine ever since. I find immense comfort in the psalmist's painting of God's expansive power and grace, and in the shocking magnitude of my forgiveness.

I was reading this Psalm a few years ago, pregnant, weary and stretched beyond all reason, and my eyes fell on verse 14: "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust."

HAL.LE.LU.JAH. This has been such a consolation to me ever since, particularly in the smallness of these mothering-of-little-people years.

I am trying to be very intentional about being with my kids. I like them, and I just want to really walk with them, not simply point them towards a destination and tell them to go. But when I'm overtired, my physical body lacking some of the stabilizing abilities that my heart and mind depend on, being with the kids is emotionally exhausting. I ride all of their feelings right along side of them, vibrating in perfectly discordant harmony with their highs and lows. When all is peaceful and quiet, I am calm and grounded. When two or more are screaming, I easily become ... ahem ... slightly agitated.

'Tis bittersweet. I wouldn't trade it, and I won't regret it, but it's depleting. Hence the comfort of knowing that He knows I'm dust. When I can't connect two coherent thoughts, He knows. When I can't muster the energy to form even the simplest of prayers, I can just be. As a friend reminded me, we are more than minds; we are spirits too, and intimate friends can be together without words. What a friend we have in Jesus.

A stranger, a woman who is a generation ahead of me in the journey, wrote this to a woman who is very much in the same stage as me in the journey:

He can cope with your less than adequate communion with Him because He's the One who sees the heart, not the performance. Trust me, I battled the same thing years (and years and years) ago when I was at your stage of mummage... and now at grandma stage, I've found that He and I are still together and I love Him even more now... and I get more time to read my Bible... hang in there... this too will pass.

What a gift.