Hello, tender friends!
I’m going to give you fair warning because I know that a lot of you are here for the food posts. This post is about motherhood gouging my heart out.
I love Cub more each day. That phrase, “I love you more each day,” is one that I knew but never understood until having my Cub.
Watching kids become themselves is this tremendous and bittersweet privilege. I thought I understood what love was before having Cub, but the feeling of being literally willing to lay down my life for him is something I couldn’t understand until he was here on this Earth.
Saturday mornings are the highlight of the week. Cub snuggles between me and Anthony and gets kisses on both velvety soft cheeks when we wake up. Anthony and I lock eyes over his beautiful body, communicating remember this. It doesn’t last forever.
Now that he has begun participating in his very first activities without me, I feel a mix of elation at this independence I haven’t experienced since before his birth and sorrow at another reminder of how fleeting this time is, and I’m leaning into Ecclesiastes 3:1.
Cub started Camp Awana last night. It’s a scripture memory program led by volunteers, and I drop him off at the church (not our home church-a different church that runs the program) at 5:00 and pick him up at 6:30. (Spoiler alert: I actually sat in the parking lot the whole time).
It’s the safest environment for him to have a first experience away from me. I prayed and prayed and God gave me peace that he’d be fine, and I did sense God told me all would be well.
I know that this is part of him becoming more independent, and that he needs to know how to interact with new adults and new kids without me there.
But my big boy is out there in the world navigating new relationships. When I picked him up afterwards and asked him how it went, he told me about kids I didn’t know. And of course my mind immediately went to wondering what goes on in their house and what behaviors Cub might be exposed to as a result.
We all wonder, as parents, how we have succeeded or failed at preparing our kids for life. Will I regret my parenting decisions in 5 years? In 10 years?
I can’t bear the idea of my Cub stopping loving me. I can’t bear the idea of him being exposed to the filth of this world as he gets older.
How do you raise a child to be righteous? How do you know that you have adequately prepared them to navigate a world that belongs to the Evil One?
How do you raise a child to fit in to a reasonable degree and still be set apart in a biblical sense?
You know when you encounter kids who were obviously very sheltered by their parents? What happens to those kids who are so protected and insulated? What kind of adults do they become?
What is the right balance between making sure your a child understands how the world works and also making sure that they’re not going along with things that drive them away from God?
How do you preserve such unadulterated joy?
I don’t know. But I had one of those moments when I picked Cub in which time slowed down and God reassured me about navigating the filth of this world.
We were walking back to the car, and the fragrance of crepe myrtle was so strong it stopped me in my tracks. I smelled the tree (normally crepe myrtle doesn’t smell so strong) and Cub asked me to lift him up to smell it too.
I held him as we inhaled the sweet scent together and the sun set in the distance against the Blue Ridge Mountains. This knowledge dropped into my spirit: This world my belong to the Evil One, but God has, in his mercy, still crammed it full of pieces of heaven.
His velvet soft cheeks are also heaven, and I’m soaking it all up.
Thank you for stopping by today, and thank you to the new friends! I’ll be sharing a food post on Thursday and my thoughts on the importance of defining success for yourself on next Monday’s post.
Thank you for sharing!
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tea and tenderness 
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