Sometimes raising five children feels like a giant, immovable mountain.
This morning my husband and I led the music for our beloved church after months of take-it-easy and watch-from-the-sidelines and attend-and-leave. This summer we have rested from ministry as we have never done in our almost ten years of married life, and I have felt refreshed and renewed and almost fully rested.
And yet we have missed it greatly. So we have eagerly anticipated this Sunday for a month now.
Our church has an amazing program for older children, part of the reason we go, but that program only meets during the first service. We knew this going in and had decided our first-grader was old enough to handle himself for the twenty minutes we’d play on stage during the second service.
So before the second service began, we told him that he would need to sit in the sanctuary’s art space, where we could see him, and draw until the music finished. I explained, probably too many times, that it was really important for him to stay exactly where he was and not go anywhere I couldn’t see him.
Apparently, in his 6-year-old mind, not going anywhere else did not apply to the stage.
He scaled those steps twice, once to ask his daddy something, and, when his daddy didn’t answer because he was singing into a microphone, he came to me.
Thinking he needed something important, like permission to go to the bathroom or a bandage for the scab he’d picked, I backed away from my mic and leaned down close to his face.
Me: What do you need, Jadon?
Jadon: What’s ten divided by ten?
Me: Jadon, we’re trying to lead worship here. Please stay off the stage. It’s one.
Sometimes even one child feels like a giant immovable mountain when it comes to these dreams.
God has very clearly and many times audibly called Ben and me to share music together. This is one of our two-becoming-one ways. We have spent years singing our heart-prayers and our soul-musings together, approaching the throne of God with voice linked to voice, sharing this God-intimacy purposed for us.
But there is a mountain, and this mountain is a great, lovely, matchless gift, but it is also a great big intimidating mound of dirt.
We did not begin our marriage knowing we would have five children. After two years, the first baby came along, that little one with olive skin and black-brown eyes, and then two years later number two was on his way, only I was so convinced he was a she that I bought a whole stack of little girl dresses and skirts and way-cute shirts. And then five months after welcoming that little blue-eyed boy, number three summoned forth a plus sign on that pee-stick, earlier than planned but welcome all the same.
Three boys filled the rooms in our house, and we thought one more. Just one more.
One more was a girl, but she slipped away, and then the longing for a baby become almost unbearable in the months after that devastating loss.
We tried again. And got twin boys.
These boys are rowdy and wild and awesome, and even on the worst days I would never, ever, ever trade my life for another, because this one is brim full of laughter and revelation and delight that far outweigh the work and frustration and impractical of it all (most days at least).
And yet, on days like today, I wonder how unveiling our dreams and then chasing our dreams and then living our dreams is even remotely possible. On days like today, all those numbers feel like one more layer stacking the top of that mountain.
Husband and I occasionally will use a date night to hear local musicians play, and I have found that when I’m listening to these who are playing their gigs several nights a week and traveling outside the local area, my first thought is, “They obviously don’t have children.”
This qualifier, or disqualifier, should not pass my lips.
All these times we’ve shared our dreams with others, our dreams for living artistically and sharing music and writing and art, the cynics race from their hiding, lending their how-in-the-world voices to our five-kids reality and speaking world-wisdom in place of God-wisdom, and sometimes it’s just too much to handle, because I was thinking the exact same thing.
Apparently people with five children aren’t allowed to live their dreams.
And days like today, I guess I agree, because it feels like a mountain I can’t climb just to get out the door on time with enough margin to set up and sound check and run through, and it feels like a mountain just to focus on bass notes and voice notes while eyeing my unsupervised children, and it feels like a mountain that I can even attempt praying from the stage while I’m distracted by the child care or lack of it.
It feels like a huge mountain to pack them back up in our car and drive them home hours past lunchtime and naptime and still try to maintain some sort of schedule for the rest of this tired-and-grouchy-kids day.
And yet I know this Savior who moves mountains, because He is the same Savior who protected number 3’s head during a church nursery accident and then healed that fracture so his little brain was unharmed, and He is the same Savior who spared my daughter a shell-life in this world and instead gave her paradise, and He is the same Savior who held my hand through the tension of a twin-pregnancy and all its risking and bleeding and thought-we-were-losing.
He is the same Savior who wrapped my heart in peace during a thirty-six-hour hospital stay, who wrapped my heart in love after my daughter’s death, who wrapped my heart in joy when those much-prayed-for twins entered our world six weeks early.
Mountains, all of them. Mountains moved.
[Tweet “Our dreams may seem impossible. They’re not. Because Someone Else holds them.”]
This Author of salvation is also the Author of our dreaming, the Author of our very living, and He has called us to this place and this time and these amazing little boys, and He does not call where He will not help, “For the God who calls you is faithful, and He can be trusted to make it so.”[1]
[Tweet “God can still move mountains. So we can dream in spite of our mountains.”]
And so tonight, when we are back in this church sanctuary worshiping with a crowd of teenagers, I steal a glance at my husband, and I lift my hands for the yield, and I close my eyes, because this is my favorite part of the song:
“I give my life to follow everything I believe in. Now I surrender.”
[1] 1 Thessalonians 5:24, The Voice.
This essay is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 9: We Unveil Trust. Dreams. The Kingdom of God. The Family on Purpose series spans the first year Rachel and her examined their family values. She spent a year writing essays on her family’s journey–all the failures and all the small victories along the way.
