My hope -
my earnest expectation, my joy and my anchor in the midst of a storm -
is that even
my life matters.

It isn’t all meaningless. There is a reason, a purpose, a plan.

Because, you see, I am changing the world today.

My life can feel small sometimes.
Compared to what I dreamed about.
Where is my Great Canadian Novel?
Where is my money?
(Seriously. Where is it?)
Where is my fame?
Where are the thousands of people
that I am impacting?

Instead, here is what I do:
(and the doing of it will not make me famous)

I get up three times during the night,
stepping over a small girl sleeping on a toddler mattress in the corner of our bedroom,
to reach for the crying baby boy.
I hold him in the pitch-dark, letting his mouth find my breast,
his instincts in the dark are better than mine.

Sometimes I fall asleep in the chair.

Then I lay him back in his bed, stumble back to my bed,
checking to make sure that the wee girl is properly covered and warm before
sliding into the covers, pressing up against my husband’s back.
And two hours later, I do it all over again.

I lay in bed every morning for an extra thirty minutes
while Brian gets ready and the tinies dance around him in the washroom.
This is my gift in return for being up all night – 3o minutes in bed by myself.
It’s my time to pray, to breathe, to meditate.
Then I crawl out from the duvet,
kiss my husband with my lips shut tight against morning breath,
and make our beds.

My daughter runs a commentary all morning long
(evidently not speaking all night long has resulted in a burst dam of conversation),
words spilling behind her as she follows us about the house.
Joseph sits at my feet and reaches up with his dimpled arms,
calling “MumMumMumMumMum”
until I reach down and lift him up.
He burrows his runny nose into my hair,
clutches my neck and burrows.

I get frustrated trying to get everyone dressed and clean for the day.
I sometimes forget to make sure everyone’s teeth are brushed.
I am responsible for clipping 60 fingernails.
I notice that Anne only likes colourless food these days…
things that are yellow, brown or a dull orange….
foods like macaroni, grilled cheese, bread, crackers, cereal, cream of wheat.
I make a pot of tea every morning and it’s usually gone by 10 AM.
I sit on the floor and build puzzles.
We read books.
I don’t eat breakfast until nearly lunchtime.
They squabble over toys and territory.
I longingly think of wearing high heels and being in my office again.
We read books.
We make up a song about a new letter every day.

This week we are singing about the letter W.
W W W W W W is for WATER.
W is for WATERMELON.
W is for WET.
W is for (dum dum ba dah dah dum) WIGGLE!
And then we wiggle all over the house.
Neither one of us can sing (Anne is shockingly off-key)
but we just keep trying to come up with W words and
then when we can’t think of anymore,
we holler WIGGLE and wiggle all over again.
Joseph quite enjoys wiggling, we’ve discovered.

I laugh until I nearly cry.
I see their little heads, bent close together,
working away on something and I feel full.
We go for walks. We go to Starbucks.
We chat with our neighbours. We go the bank.
We come home for lunch. The tinies go to bed for a nap.

And I go to work.
I write press releases. I research.
I read stories of women that are caught fast in nets of despair,
depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, physical and sexual abuse,
self-harm, anorexia and bulimia.
I am their advocate.
I am advocating for their freedom and
their release from the prison of hopelessness.
I write a marketing strategy.
I think long and hard about what our key performance drivers should be.
I pray for more money to come in.
I write web pages.
I pray that the tinies will stay asleep so I can finish more work.
I feel small, David against Goliath sometimes.
But full of faith and hope and love,
knowing that we are doing a great thing in small steps.
Then they wake up.

And I’m exhausted, my sleepless night catching me again.
But we do our chores now.
We clean, we do laundry, we bake, we get supper ready.
And what’s that sound?
Is that a key in the door?
It is.
It’s Papa Bear, Mumma! Papa Bear is home!

Brian walks in the door and Anne promptly informs him that he is STINKY.
But he kisses all of us.
And he goes to have a shower after a day spent
laying hardwood floors or building decks or repairing walls.
We eat our supper, we talk about our days,
he wants the details of everything Joseph learned.
And Anne never stops talking. Joseph never stops eating.

Brian wraps his arms around me
while I step around the dishwasher door open in the kitchen.
I squirm away,
too busy to stop for a hug sometimes.

We bath the tinies, at the end letting Anne have deep water
and bubbles with her Noah’s Ark toys for a half hour.
That’s our time with Joseph, to get him ready for bed,
for Brian to play with him one-on-one.
Now it’s seven o’clock already so everyone has to head to bed.
I am nursing Joseph, holding him close to my body,
his blonde hair curling against me while I am reading emails.
Brian is in our bed, reading
The Sneetches or Amelia Bedelia or “Curious AND George, Daddy.”
We say prayers, we tuck babies into their beds,
we remember we need to brush their teeth,
we decide it can wait until tomorrow morning.

We meet in the living room at 7:30, both exhausted from our days.
We talk. We laugh. We lay on the floor and complain.
Brian checks football and hockey scores. I write a blog.
We watch The Daily Show online.
I knit Christmas presents, a long list in my mind of projects to complete.
We read books. We kiss on the floor for a while.
He goes to bed.

The house is quiet at last.
I clean up the kitchen, tuck away the last of the toys.
I sit on the couch and wind yarn in the silence, just enjoying a still house after
the tornado of activity all day.
I know I should go to bed – a long night is ahead -
but I can’t surrender the quiet.

And yet this frees me to hopeful instead of despairing.
Some people find the daily work a distraction.
A barrier between them and their real self.

This is my real self.
This is my real life.

I am changing the world today by changing one life at a time.
By being fully present, by making space for God wherever I walk,
by being open and full of invitation to the Holy Spirit.
I am changing the world and I am starting with myself.

So I find hope here.
I find hope in the corners of my daily life.
I am finding hope because I am surrounded by love.

This is it.
No do-overs.
My hope is that what I am doing now,
today,
matters.

Sarah Bessey lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her husband and two tinies. Her blog can be found at www.emergingmummy.com.

By Krista Finch

Ooo, child, things are gonna get easier
Ooo, child, things will get brighter
Someday…
The Five Stairsteps, “Ooo, Child”

Hope. It’s the place you move to when you get evicted from all those warm, comfy circumstances. And as you unpack your beat-up guitar, your Bible, a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, the rosary you made for your son and those pearl earrings from the love of your life (the only necessary possessions) you realize these four walls may suit you better.

Sure the other place had crisp paint on the walls and hardwood floors, but underneath it was water-damaged drywall and a cracked foundation. You just couldn’t see it yet.

And the new place – hope – is a little dingy, but this haven of expectancy and brokenness has potential. It’s made you count what you love best and do things you never thought possible. The way you see it, you’ve got nothing but time to clean up the dust bunnies in your new home. And Grace just hollered from the back room that she’s here to help.

Krista Finch is a wife, a new mom and an author with a passion for finding glimpses of glory in an as-is world. Her recent book, As Is, digs into the mundane majesty of life here and now.

By Jenny Rae Armstrong

It’s been a rough year up in my neck of the woods. Our church lost two babies to SIDS and two young mothers to cancer, a statistic that would be less shocking in a larger community, but slices right through the heart of a tiny town like ours. My family lost a grandfather to kidney failure and an uncle to bladder cancer. The Wall Street debacle flushed what was left of a local economy that had been in the toilet since shipping dried up in the late fifties, devastating the homes, bank accounts, and job security of those of us clinging like barnacles to the shallow, rocky soil our stoic Scandinavian ancestors dug their plows into. And that’s all on top of the ongoing, everyday problems of living in a broken world. I spent most of last night lying awake, listening to my autistic son cry in his sleep, cleaning up the mess created by a GI system that just can’t absorb food properly. Somewhere between awake and asleep, set to the dissonant sound of my son’s distress, I remember thinking, “It’s not fair, God. It’s just not fair.”

It’s true. It’s not fair. Yet in some ways it is fair, brutally fair. God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked (and heaven knows we’re all more than a little bit of both!), and didn’t shrink back from experiencing all the joy and pain of being human when he came to earth in the person of Jesus, a baby born into poverty and oppression, into the hopeless mess of humankind.

Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen? Why do we even ask? We have bought into the myth that we are entitled to an easy life, that it’s God’s job to smooth our paths and make them straight, to protect us from the fall-out of simply being human. Life wasn’t so great for Jesus, or his family, or his disciples, either. Why? Because God was mad at them? Because God didn’t care? Because they didn’t have enough faith? Because God blinked, and something slipped by him? No. Life was hard for them because in the words of the bumper sticker, shit happens, and sometimes it happens to us. No one is immune.

The Western world is addicted to comfort. We cruise down the path of least resistance in our climate-controlled SUVs, singing along to our favorite Christian radio stations, but what happens when we hit a bump in the road and get a flat, when we start leaking oil and burn up our engine? Do we set the emergency brake, lock our doors, shake our fist-clamped cell phones at the sky and wait for God to show up with a tow truck? Or do we climb off our high-horse, join the ranks of suffering humanity, and start putting one foot in front of the other in the direction of home?

I babysat a lot as a teenager. When I was fifteen a family I sat for, the Muirs, decided to take in a foster baby who had been born without a brain. When Karen, the mother, told me what they were planning to do, I was angry. That baby was going to die, and everyone knew it. Why would they put themselves through the pain of becoming attached to a baby who was doomed from the get-go? Why would they put their children through that pain? “But Jenny,” Karen reasoned, “don’t you think he has a right to be loved, too?” I supposed I did, but not at the expense of people I loved. Not at the cost of causing them pain.

It was not until little Emory’s funeral, just over a year later, that I began to realize the impact his life had had. Not because of anything he had done-because really, there wasn’t much he could do, besides breathe, suckle, and mess his pants, and even those were iffy-but because of the way he had been loved. Because of the Christ-like way the Muirs embraced the blessing and suffering of this tiny bit of beautiful, broken humanity, claiming and redeeming it for a greater purpose, and received more in return than they could ever have imagined.

What did I learn from Emory and the Muirs? That pain is not something to be avoided. That suffering and blessing more often than not come wrapped in the same package. That sometimes, it’s enough to be loved by a heartbroken God who came to claim and redeem us for a greater purpose. Sometimes, it’s just enough.

It’s been a blessed year or so in our neck of the woods. May the love, peace, and joy of a God who knows what it is to suffer sustain us all through the next, and lead us safely home.

Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer and musician. She and her husband Aaron own DeepWater Music (www.deepwatermusic.net) and live in Northern Wisconsin with their four little boys. This post originally appeared at her blog jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.