Towels, dishes, sandals, and all the other ordinary things in our lives reveal what we are made of more quickly than anything else. –Oswald Chambers

It was the morning, which is when the contractions are least frequent but the fingers are most numb and time is the most scarce. The Kid was running around his familiar path: sidewalk, porch, and front yard, then a cutaway to the little hill on our neighbor’s side of the driveway. Said neighbor just had his yard aerated and seeded, which is a fancy way of saying it looked like a rabbit had pooped everywhere, and of course TK wanted to climb “his” hill. Up and down, up and down, muddy and muddier.

This is the difference between seeing grace and not seeing it: a child who, not long ago, would never have ventured up that hill, now conquering it endlessly, and I’m worried about cleaning the mud off his shoes before school. He’s grinning at me from the peak, and I’m smiling tightly back, wondering how much time this will take.

This is the difference between knowing redemption and not knowing it: TK ambles down the hill, sneakers sodden, and I take a breath. Put his hand on my shoulder, remove his shoes, and walk us all over to the hose. And within seconds, the mud is gone and I haven’t even cried. The world holds together another day.

There are those for whom this all comes easily: happily wiping down surfaces that are dirty, watching a cascade of water travel from sink to floor and calmly mopping it up sans emotional breakdown. Congratulations to you, my friend. We are not alike. But on this late summer morning, with the temperature just starting to drop and new life on the way, grace showed up in mud, redemption in a gush of water from a hose. Sometimes the only thing to do is just the next thing.

I’m about to go from late pregnancy to newborn days, and I asked my friend the other day to tell me something good. Repeat what she had said about how it gets easier, how it’s never quite as hard as the first time around. And she did, and I believe her? I really want  to. But there’s this problem of knowing myself, of knowing the quick temper all too well, the effect of the cry on me, the feeling of seeming totally unproductive for weeks at a time. The exit, albeit temporarily, from normal life and the entry into that dark, sleepless cave. I’m cooking and freezing dinners, folding and putting away laundry, writing and saving drafts like someone battening down the hatches pre-hurricane. I know that the one thing I want–to feel normal–will be the most elusive. Impossible, really. So let’s find the grace in that.

A mandated rest that turns out not to be very restful; a forced stillness and homebound status. They won’t even let me drive! And I think about it, how I’ve been home now–not working–for almost a year. How in that year, TK has triumphed over surgery and spasms, how we lost one pregnancy and kept another, how I’ve written more than ever, how those dark nights in the hospital room mark the date from which they determine when Little Brother will be born. Life from stillness. Maybe productivity, maybe worth, maybe life’s calling all look completely different from the picture the world provides.

I attach so much of my own worth to what I’ve accomplished in a given realm: patients seen, words written, dinners served. A house that’s pretty and clean and smells good (thank you, autumn-themed diffusers) so that my family has a warm, safe, healthy place to rest. It’s impossible to completely untangle how much of what I do is for acclaim and how much is done from a heart that already knows it’s loved. But there are times that make the untangling easier: times of rest that is not very restful, times of forced stillness. Of halted production and being only able to do the very next thing: to feed a child and keep him alive another day and that be the only thing I’ve accomplished. And yet–somehow it’s going to be everything.

I spend so much time looking for a spot to be meaningful; maybe I’m already there. I want to inject activities and words into the world that will make a difference; and his tiny shoes need the mud washed off and the poetry shows up there. The counter needs wiping. The big one could use some homemade cookies.

And with every clasp of the carseat’s belt, every bath time laugh, every shared glance over the dinner table, meaning is woven in through the ordinary and a calling is lived and grace is spoken in whispers that make a difference.