Hope for the Simple

I called my husband to let him know I was heading home soon. My son and I had an appointment and I was cutting it close on leaving work. To say this is not normal is sadly not true. It’s not even a thing of time management, it really comes down to the last minute patients and requests that come in that need to be cared for before heading out the door. My son being the good son that he is was waiting in the driveway to hope in the truck so that we could get to his school in a timely manner.

School conferences are important, I know they are. My husband and I haven’t missed one yet for any one of the kids. This year combining the three kids we have a total of eight conferences to go to. Some are in person while others are over Zoom. My son and I rushed to his tonight and let me tell you, it wasn’t boring. I love meeting the teachers and hearing how my kids are doing in school, but the meetings get to a certain point in which we are done talking, there are no questions to ask and we all just look at each other waiting for someone to say something. This is all in the timespan of five minutes because I have am lucky enough to have the kids that the teachers don’t really have anything bad to say about them. There are no complaints, they are good listeners, they help their classmates and they can be trusted. As a momma I love to hear these things especially when my kids are all these things at home but in a different light. I also always hope for the simple when it comes to the conferences because I know the older my kids get the less simple life is.

My middle child and my oldest, have more teachers to meet with and more subjects to talk about, but they also have mental health days, harder classes, identity issues, and classes they want or didn’t get to discuss. We get to find out how good or bad they really are doing in their classes. This is when I hope for the simple, I actually crave it. I think about how much I would love to have a conference like my girls had when they were in elementary school. No world issues, no classes they didn’t get or subjects they didn’t understand.

As a momma I want to gather my kids up like a mother hen does her chicks and protect them from the world. By doing this they don’t get to experience life, they don’t get to have the thrill of an adventure. I think back to when I was their age and if my momma tried to do that to me I would have resisted and fought to have my independence. But oh! I now know how my momma must have felt with the decisions we made.

I don’t know if there really is a thing as “simple”, no matter how much I want to hope for it. Work will always be busy, the kids will make decisions that will make me want to wonder “what were they thinking?”. Life is not simple. There are simple moments, simple projects and recipes to follow. Jesus is simple.

The more and more that I hope for simple, hope for peace, hope for more joy, I have to step back and look at the life I am living. What am I doing to help make my job easier vs. harder? The one thing I always come back to is this: the more I rely on myself to live the life I strive for the more I stress about obtaining that life. When I make time to be quiet with the Lord, read the Bible and actually pray (not just quickly say a short prayer and leave), there is peace and simplicity. My problems don’t go away, the craziness of life stays crazy, but the change comes from knowing that I don’t have to shoulder it all on my own. What’s better is that there is this inner peace that I get immediately. That is a simple hope that is simply gotten.

I have had to come to the realization over the years that you can’t force people to believe the way you do or think the way you think. They are going to have their or thoughts, beliefs and opinions. This isn’t something new, what is new though is that my kids are starting to realize that they have different thoughts, opinions and beliefs than their parents. It’s a change that takes getting used for sure, and it opens up the paths that they will take to becoming adults. So I pray for wisdom, peace and that they will not have to stumble over their chosen paths, but instead find a way to hope for their own kind of simple. Until next time:

Simply put, there isn’t anything in this world that is simple.