“I think I am going a touch crazy.”
The words catch in my throat somewhere in the midst of scratching casserole remains from the corners of a 9 by 13 pan and monitoring piano practices. Maybe another day I could have found something to feebly chuckle about through the choking words, but today stinging tears of exhaustion and hopelessness blur my vision. From my vantage point at the kitchen sink, it all looks despairingly familiar, a millionth showing of a frame jammed on replay. And at this point in the scene, the script calls for me to sink my head down onto the countertop and have a good cry…or just give up and run away.
A few steps from the sink, 6-year-old Levi pounces on the back of growling 4-year-old Kai, the roar and rumble of their wrestle sending wedgits scattering amidst the legos, blocks and tractors. Yet I can hardly move to break up the roiling tangle for the weight wrapping around my feet: baby Shalom clinging to my leg, slapping my hip with her whimpering pleas, “Coat on! Outside! Mammmaaa, coat on!”
At the kitchen table, Caleb howls with laughter over his sketched caricature of Joshua, who now fumes retaliation, both negligent of the grammar diagramming lessons at hand. Hope accompanies the entire scene with an appropriate score: gratingly wrong notes of “Morning Has Broken.”
“It’s me who is just about broken, somewhere deep inside,” I scoop up wailing Shalom and stumble through the legos to the quiet of our bedroom. “If only I could touch Christ,” the words spill out, “He’d gently smooth out my mothering mess…”
Touch Christ
Closing my eyes to the whirl, my mind’s eye makes out the staggering woman tripping, scuffing her knees, the wee pebbles burning along the scrape. I wince: I know the pain of falling. Then she raises a hand, trembling, to make a final lunge for his hem and hope: “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well” (Matt. 9:21).
When I am going a touch crazy, can I remember to close my eyes, and stretch out a quavering hand? Relinquishing my slipping grip on a chaotic day, I lunge to touch Christ’s hem, the hem of Him who can restore and renew. “And Jesus perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” (Mark 5:30). To touch Christ is to touch the power of hope, the power of wholeness, the power of healing.
Touch Cross
He to whose hem I cling leads me to the Cross He asks me to embrace. In the vortex of a day spinning out of control, He takes my hand from his hem and calls me to carry a cross. I can hardly stand under the heavy weight of it all, to disciple a half dozen little sinners in the path of Jesus by example…and yet I hear Him whisper to my heart, “For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin” (Heb. 12:3-4).
To walk this way of the Cross is to take up the way of mercy and grace. As He pours mercy mingled down upon this head leaning against the foot of the cross, so now He calls me to similarly extend grace in this home to wrestling, teasing boys and their weary mother. When I am going a touch crazy, I must remember to press lips to this Cross, and inhale: receive Christ’s mercy… then exhale: give Christ’s grace. Mercy, grace, mercy, grace.
Touching the cross resuscitates me, changing how I breathe, how I live… how I mother.
Touch Cave
In the crushing milieu of today, I relish the quiet of this room, this still grotto of calm tucked away. When I’m going a touch crazy, I need to find a cave, enter into the still, and let new life stir.
Whether I close my eyes for a moment, or slip into an empty room, I can touch the stillness of the resurrection cave and let the powers of new life heal these wounds, revive me, restore to wholeness. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Finding the quiet of Christ’s cave wherever I am is to resurrect from my death in trespasses and sin and to let the life of Christ, pregnant with new, life-giving ways, fill me, grow in me, produce fruit in me.
Touch Children
Touching Christ, the Cross and the Cave leads me back to the center, where I can smile with Him, “Let the little children come.”
Pulling Shalom close, I bury my face in her soft curls. “Let’s go touch all the little children.”
I gently lay my hand on the older boys’ shoulders while helping with grammar, softly brush Hope’s hair as she ascends and descends her scales, touch the little boys with smiles and applause as they stack wedgits.
Touching Christ, the Cross and the Cave lets me touch children with the Gospel hope of renewal: “Then the one who looked like a man touched me again, and I felt my strength returning” (Dan. 10:18 NLT).
As I touch the children, I too feel this strength…hope…returning.
Touch Cana
I lustily sing in time with Hope’s tinkling of the ivories.
As Kai tackles me from behind, I turn with my own fury of tickles, dissolving into a sprawl of laughter, Hope and Levi piling in on our fun. It feels good to laugh, releasing the tight grip of control to touch the joy and celebration of Cana, imbibing deeply of the feast of now.
Jesus has come, touching the water of our days and turning it into the sweet wine of delight. As we laugh and touch Cana, Jesus works a miracle in this home, transforming our hopelessness and thirst into a glimpse of the Great joyous Feast to come. Touching Cana makes us laugh with the wonder of it all, this life together, Christ at the center.
Somewhere in the midst of scratching casserole remains from the corners of a 9 by 13 pan and monitoring piano practices, I had gone a touch crazy, lost my way, lost touch with the hallowed call to motherhood.
In the press of it all, I had forgotten how these intense mothering days are a daily spiritual retreat, Him calling me to come touch that which will direct towards Home.
Touching Christ, the Cross, and the cave had drawn me back to touch children with the delightful touch of Cana.
The scene was the same, but I could hear a new score playing. Morning had Broken and I’d been restored.
Touching the things of Christ has a way of doing that.
(From the archives of CWO)
Photo: a sleeping Shalom
