Living Water

General Conference helped this weekend. It gave me an opportunity to be still. To listen. To focus. To remember. I remembered a little bit why I care. I remembered a little bit why it's important to try. It feels nice. It feels better.

For one of the sessions, we went outside. My daughter is sick, so we didn't join the rest of the family at my parents' house for the Sunday sessions, and I'm glad. I love my family. I love the children running around and their little voices ringing out and the mamas whispering to them to behave and the dads softly snoring. I love that, but I needed to not be in it today. I needed only my kids and me, outside on the lawn in the sunshine. 

The sun shined today. It feels like it hasn't shined in years, but it shined today, and I felt it and pulled it around me and let it hold me.

We listened to one of the conference sessions outside in the sunshine. While I listened, I watched. I watched the ants crawling and exploring. I watched the birds playing in the treetops and picking at each other for territory. I watched the wind rustle the blades of grass. Most of all, I watched my son in his sandbox, meticulously creating his ditches and organizing his rocks and sticks that are not ditches and rocks and sticks but rivers and villages and castles and kingdoms and worlds. He's fifteen years old but also five years old, and I'm glad.

My cup was filled just a little bit today. I was fed with living water, and my thirst feels slightly quenched. Enough that I can care again, at least for a while. I still have lots of work to do. I still need to figure out how to fill my cup to overflowing so I have more to give to others, but today helped.

I'm grateful.




Sandbox


I once heard a fairytale about a mother

who loved her child so much

she locked him up in a necklace around her neck

so he could never grow and never leave her

it seemed so cruel

until I blinked and my son

became so long he was bigger than the monkey bars ladder

became so wise he was teaching his friends

became so strong he held his mother instead of her holding him

and the world wanted to take him from the sandbox

and teach him how it's cruel

and I could not stop it or protect him 

and then I understood.

Contemplation and Creation


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