To my children,
I hope, today, that when you call “Mom,” I’ll turn and lift my head the first time. I hope that along with the consequence, you’ll hear an “I love you” and feel my arms around you. I hope you’ll give your sister some animals, too, and that when your brother has the book you want, you won’t scream and throw the animals in your hand to the floor. I hope you’ll keep pretending that the fan is an airplane bringing your aunt to visit you. I hope you’ll keep saying “Peppa!” and toddling over with the Peppa Pig book, again. I hope, son, that at the playground you’ll keep trying to speak Spanish, even when the other kids push you or run away. I hope, daughter, that you’ll keep trying to climb the ladder to the slide that is far too tall for you.
I want you to never give up when you’re trying to maneuver into your jeans, then to maneuver a bike, then to maneuver a car. I want you to know I’ll be the trampoline. As you launch into the air with math facts and soccer and jobs and love, I’ll be your soft landing when you fall and send you soaring all over again. I want you to grow to fit so comfortably in your own skin that you can focus fully on making the others around you comfortable, too. I want you to learn to speak up and to keep silent out of bravery and love and curiosity, not selfishness and fear.
I hope you become the kind of men and women who notice the silent one on the outskirts, and welcome that person in. I hope you become the kind of people who can say “yes” to one more at the table and “no” to one more request you know is not yours to fill. I hope, when I’m gone, you remember laugh wrinkles and sure hands and tender heart.
Big dreams. Tall goals. Huge hopes. Some dreams will wither, some goals go unreached, some hopes be dashed. That’s why I hope, above all, that our foundations, yours and mine and your father’s, will be sunk so deep in the bedrock of Christ that though our failures and life’s disappointments will crack walls and blow windows in, those foundations will go untouched. I pray love flows from the Father, to me, to you, to the kids at the park and the clerk at Wal-Mart and the future significant other. I pray Jesus will so saturate my life and yours that speaking to Him and of Him is as natural as breathing. I pray the Spirit grows more fruit than I can possibly imagine right now, on this sunny afternoon, on this red couch, during this naptime.
I’ll pray you’ll know Him to be enough, because all my words and hopes and deeds, all your words and hopes and deeds–they’re not.
All my love, always,
Mom
This Motley Crew 