After I wrote yesterday’s post, I remembered a moment I’d had one day when E woke up from her nap–a good year ago, if not more. And I thought at the time that there was no better definition for how I felt (which was tired, worn, and otherwise struggling) than poured out. It fit so perfectly. Parenthood is so often about giving and doing and going on when you have no energy to do any of those things, about realizing that you can’t but you must and so you do. (Er, not to sound unremittingly negative–I only mean that sometimes there are moments like that. They seem to be fewer now than they were at first.)
So there I was, feeling the full weight of the phrase “poured out” in a dramatic way that I’d never understood before. Of course, the next second I realized that I had unwittingly used a Bible phrase in a non-Bible context–and then it hit me like a load of bricks: if this is what being poured out feels like, then that same sort of dire abandon, that extravagant consumption of me-ness, should rise out of being a believer, in even greater measure.
I never cease to be amazed at how much parenthood changes and informs me about things I should have known long before. It is so gracious the way that God uses everyday, mundane circumstances to impact me eternally.
