every now and then...

Every now and then...something unique happens injecting beauty into normalcy. Like when my daughters consipired together this morning to bring mommy breakfast in bed for mother's day. Granted, it's a day away, but in their minds, they are beating the world to the worm. I was in the shower when I heard them traipsing up the stairs with giggles and whispers. I knew something was afoot, so I dried off with superhero speed and headed to the "Master bedroom" to see what was going down. There sat Heidi with a little make shift tray garnered with a couple pieces of burnt toast covered with blotchy chunks of butter and a bowl of cereal that looked like it had been sitting on the kitchen counter for just under a half a year. Heidi looked at me and said that they poured water in the raisen bran because we were all out of milk. That explained the eery film coating the soggy flakes. There's something about water in cereal that makes you dry heave just looking at it.

Heidi was surrounded by the girls watching her eat every bite. They wanted her to eat it all and like every minute of it. Heidi asked them respectfully if she could bypass the cereal which now looked more like a thick morter used to lay down tile in bathrooms. They gleefully released her from the obligation of choking it down. I have to give her credit for downing the toast with just shy of a half a stick of butter resting on its surface. It will take four weeks at the YMCA just to work off the butter say nothing of the toast.

These are the moments when you wonder why you are using birth control. These are the times when you want to fill your home with offspring and start an orphanage in your garage on the side. These are the experiences that break through the ominous overcast of living life and warm your soul with rays of meaning. The kind of meaning that makes it hard to leave for work.

Last night, I was sitting on the couch after practicing with our church softball team and Aly climbed up on my lap. They were watching Lion King, Simba's Pride and so I settled into the storyline while she curled up and tucked her slender body inside my arms. I just so happened to enter the story when a male lion and a female lion were sending out the signals of interest to each other. They were licking each other and rubby their heads against each others necks (this would be lion necking). Aly turned her head to catch my eye and said, "They are in love." I smiled and nodded my head. Just the way she talks when she's interacting about romance sends chills down my spine. Maybe it's the foreshadowing of her teen years. Maybe it's the beauty of the glory that God puts in the female heart, but whatever it is, it makes me a mix of scared spitless and overjoyed.

As the scene continues with a musical number whereby this lion couple frolics about like they had just rolled in a pile of catnip, Aly kissed my face and said as sweetly as could be, "I like love." That phrase stuck to me like dirty underwear. I went to bed last night with the cadence of that simple phrase filling my mind. I like love. How can a four year old wrap up the complexity of the human spirit so succinctly? This is the universal admission of the human heart created by Love Himself. We were created out of love and for love. Something inside us likes love. For some, they like it so much they avoid it so as to not be reminded of this longing. For others, they like it so much they run after anything that sounds, looks or feels like it. Still others rest in the simple truth that "love is all that matters" (I am Sam).

I like love, too. And though there are times I wish I had more of it, today I'm just thankful that I was raised in a family with truckloads of it, nurtured by friendships along the way that distributed it in bulk, and now am blessed to be smack dab in the fat middle of a household teeming with it. What's not to like about that?