Imitation

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, 

but they have never failed to imitate them.

James Baldwin

 

I've known it truth, the way they pattern themselves.  The little girls wearing their mama's shoes, wholly too big for their still tender feet.  The young boy patting evergreen foam to soft face and grinning wide as he swipes it smooth again.

 

It happens here.  They, wide-eyed, see me writing and erasing.  Typing, adding photos, publishing posts about our lives.  They read them too, the little ones who can.  Soaking it in, the stories I've come to tell in my own way about them all.  The poem has also found a home here, printed well in uneven strokes with shrubs of pink eraser worming up the page.

And I smile when I see their efforts, as it settles into me.  This pattern of life holds me still with child imitating parent, and I feel heavy with the responsibility of it all.  It's clear, like glass and just as fragile, the power I hold to shape their lives into Christ-followers.  I'm fully inadequate and completely imperfect, and how could God allow this human to hold the future four times over?

I'm surely weak, incapacitated by the weight of my calling.  "But he said to me, 'My grace is all you need. My power is strongest when you are weak.' (2 Corinthians 12:9)

In mistakes, in times of limits reached, when energy has drained right empty and the shell of this mama wants to crumble in her bed, I need reminding that I'm not meant to do it alone.  Every day, every day I feel inadequate for the tasks that are set before me, but it is all his loving grace that rescues me, reminds me, remembers me.  Calling me well as I seek his face.

"Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you." 

Jeremiah 29:12