minutes

It's 8:42 p.m.  In about fifteen minutes, I'll head upstairs to get ready for bed, and by 9:30 (in my ideal world), my head will hit the pillow and I'll drift off to a mother's only vacation:  sleep.

Tomorrow morning I'll get up with my Farmer, approximately half an hour after his alarm rings at 5:20 a.m.  (This is a ten-years' compromise between jump-out-of-bed-at-the-first-ring me and hit-the-snooze-button-a-dozen-times him.)  I'll shower and head downstairs to make coffee, have my first quiet time of the day, and then eat breakfast . . . and another day is off and running.

There's so much the same, day after day.  So little to remark on when someone asks me, "what's new?"  And yet, as a friend reminded me today, it's what we have.  This is the life we've been given, the life we'll look back on one day, in wonder that it was so quickly over.

                    Will I have really lived?

I spend so much time in the past - berating myself for mistakes, shortcomings, regrets - and yet again so much time in the future - planning, worrying, imagining, dreaming.  What about the present?

I wrote out my one thousand gifts.  I do see the present, when I'm thanking.  It's ingratitude that shifts my focus back, or on ahead.

I will make my minutes count:  I will see.  Lil' Snip's twinkling eyes as he learns to make a joke; Nice's beatific smile as she hugs me for no reason; Spice's confident smile, offering to watch Lil' Snip - "he'll be happy after a bit"; even Sugar, crying her disappointment, then laughing over video footage of her beloved little brother.

I will see:  my Farmer, giving up his night out so that I could go (and then both of us happily staying home together); Sugar's knowing eyes as she assures me that I do deny myself for them, and gives examples; Spice's joy to have a doing project instead of a writing one.

I will see:  Nice shyly showing us the motions to a song she learned; Spice delighting in the delicacy of Bible pages; Lil' Snip putting on his sisters' tiara and saying "hansum boy!" to our laughter.

When the end comes, I will have lived.  And, with God's help, my eyes will be open to see all the minutes.