Five Minute Friday - Willing

On Fridays a bunch of brave writers gather here to all spend 5 collective minutes writing on a single prompt. It’s a great way to catch your breath at the end of a long week. This blessed, beautiful place where we open our hearts and let words and tears and the inner workings of our lives bleed and flow and dance across the virtual pages. Yes, this community opens wide and invites you in to share. Come and visit and read. You will be blessed.

This week: Willing

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I often write about life’s deserts here; trying to find grace and joy in them. There are times lately I feel that this stretch of parenting is my desert. I am confronted by long stretches of dryness that seem to have no relief. There is a hot sun that beats down relentlessly – exposing every inch of my inadequacies and abundant failures while creating a pressure cooker of expectation and the dry heat of longing. I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve walked on this road with no oasis in sight for a long, long time.

One of the most difficult things I’ve found on this parenting road – in this parenting desert – is how very much my daughter looks up to me. It is a blessing and a bane. A bittersweet honor that I love and fear, all at the same time. I very often wish she didn’t.

You see, my daughter has been entrusted to a woman who struggles. Who is fiercely independent (often called stubborn); who sometimes hasn’t figured out that her teenage rebellion days are over; who still bucks the system and struggles not to pick every hill to plant a flag on. This woman – this person I see reflected in the mirror – she still wants to smack everyone who makes her angry; says too many of the wrong things when her temper breaks (and it breaks often and well, trust me); she desires a gentle spirit, but has hard, hard time bending her knee.

Though I know it is often the right thing to do, I am often found in tears demanding how much of myself I will have to give up in order for my daughter to have the right model set before her. It’s silly – because why do I want to hang on to some of these things? These things that do not edify; encourage; or enhance. What would be the point in hanging on to them? And that’s just it – there is no point. Just the idea that I could. Theoretically. Just because.

Albert Einstein wisely said,

I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.

This is a road of truth that I need to take on my desert path through parenting and motherhood.

The things I am willing to give up, will not only make me a better person, they will help my daughter become a better person as well. What could be better than that? And I need to do this in the true spirit of willingness: humbly, softly, eagerly, without hesitation. Striving for the best so that she will have that to look up to. Christ is my guide, my North Star, my way. Anything I give up in exchange for a life in Him is nothing given up at all. Anything I gain as I become more like Him is everything I could possibly imagine. For me, as well as for my little one who is watching my every move.

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