Blessings in Snapshots

So, this just happened:



And this little dude just keeps happening:



And some mornings are like this:



And in the evening, their daddy plays his drums.

That's what he's up to now, in fact. In the evenings, after supper, the two of us put the kids to bed and then go our separate ways for a while. I've taken to running a couple of miles, listening to music and a running narrative that goes something like: Breathe. Make it to that tree. Now past that driveway. Now to the fire station, and then you can walk. Look up and out.

I've had some major luck looking up and out recently. Up past myself, past my thoughts and all their noise. Remembering simple things like look: a cloud. A fence. Sun on the water. These people here, and those people there, all of us wondering and wandering and trying to figure stuff out.

Sometimes I stop trying to figure stuff out. Sometimes I sit with my daughter, when she sneaks out of bed as she does every night, climbing into my lap to do what we call "The Cupcake Thing" since lately proclaiming that sheep were too smelly and pedestrian to woo her to sleep.

I wondered aloud what might suit her majesty's fancy, and she said "making cupcakes," so ever since then she sits on my lap and I bake a cupcake for her, and she bakes one for me. It goes like this: paper, flavor, icing, topping. Tonight hers was a Chocolate Raspberry Swirl cupcake in a rainbow wrapper, with pink shimmering icing alight with merfolk and a dolphin playing peekaboo. Mine was S'mores, which I was forced to dress up at least with a marshmallow-toasting woodsprite because who wants a boring cupcake?

NOT MY DAUGHTER, I'll have you know.

And I looked into her eyes, which are more green than hazel these days, and I listened to her daddy playing backup for Theocracy, and I thought nothing of importance at all but felt lucky, lucky, lucky.

Sweetness and stability and all of us together in a world so rent with strife and pain and tears, and a God in the midst of all of us, in warzones, and refugee camps, and making cupcakes with fancy five year old kindergartners.

The ache and the beauty. The violence and the peace. The noise and the silence and the almost-silent, settling in noises of the luckiest family in a very lucky part of the world.

Grateful doesn't even begin to cover it.

From heaven the Lord looks down
and sees all mankind;
from his dwelling place he watches
all who live on earth—
he who forms the hearts of all,
who considers everything they do...
We wait in hope for the Lord;
he is our help and our shield.
In him our hearts rejoice,
for we trust in his holy name.
May your unfailing love be with us, Lord,
even as we put our hope in you.

--from Psalm 33