Those Days In-between

What is sometimes worse than the end, worse than the leering reality that whatever you’ve been striving for or aiming towards will come to a close? The empty bedroom of your first child who left the nest, the completion of a job you gave your life to, graduation day, or a final pregnancy, or the reality that it’s just the two of you. What can sometimes require more prayer and more pep talks than gearing up and closing the door one final time?

The middle.

The dreaded in-between where you are walking day after day towards a destination that seems unknown or far out of reach. The days that cycle in and out with a kind of mundane pace that makes even Friday lose its luster.  It seems to me that the days of crisis where you have to rise to the occasion and take on the challenge ahead are the ones that make you shine the most. Where it seems to be hard for me to be faithful is in the little. The Monday-Friday kind of days where I make the same breakfast that we’ve had every day and I wake up at the same time and I eat the PBJ for lunch. These days are the ones that make or break me.

See I can rise to the occasion and I can work hard to achieve dreams, I can handle family crisis and a friend who needs me desperately but I can’t handle Wednesday, where nothing of extreme importance happens but I just have to be a parent and be a wife and live faithful in the days in the middle, not bad days just normal days. Real life days. Days where I don’t have anything for social media and the most interesting thing I can tell my husband is about our daughters poop schedule.

The middle days make us faithful, the tiny steps you take towards showing grace to your toddler or having a hard conversation with a friend. The middle days are what make us because the pictures on our walls are just snap shots of high’s that followed a lot of in-betweens. The memory books are filled with the one week a year we spent in the beach and not of the 360 other we spent in our home doing everyday life.  There will be some but not all.

Yes faithfulness is built one choice at a time, one day at a time, one embrace at a time. The grace of life comes out in those quiet moments where no one sees your actions but God sees you heart. The real faithfulness is not in what we profess with our mouths but what we live in our homes or schools. The real hard stuff is the middle days where the choice is simply this, to live fully in what we already have. The middle days are the ones where we find real joy because we can see that God is present in the ordinary. Anyone can ride the highs of life but it takes a truly saved soul to love the ordinary, to know that grace and love is extended each day when we deserve no such thing. That, my friends, is anything but ordinary.