Finding New Morning Mercies
Jumping back into normal social rhythms reminded me of how truly awful I am at small talk. Once I get past the “hi” and “hello” of a conversation, my next question leads to “what’s new?” When I ask that question, I often refer to what someone is doing instead of how they are. What are you accomplishing? What’s the latest and great project that you are working on?
What new thing are you doing?
And I think it’s super important to bring up to who I’m often directing this question to. I’m in the stage of my life where most of my interactions are with other parents. Moms in various stages of parenting from new moms, moms with tiny toddlers, moms with preschoolers, moms of school-age kids, and etc., and so on. Yet despite the diversity in age, occupation, and even kids’ ages, you know what answer I receive most?
Nothing much.
I’m also guilty of answering like this. It’s such an easy way to answer this particular question because I even feel like no one wants to hear it. Let me hide all of the chaos under a proverbial rug and make it look like nothing is there. A more honest answer sounds like I barely kept my head above water juggling school pick-up schedules with early out, making lunches, grocery shopping, and an ever-changing firefighter schedule. You don’t even want to get me started on my chore list or the things I have going on in my work life.
Every day, truthfully, is a new challenge.
Just when I think I have it figured out as science, there’s another variable I hadn’t considered. I’m doing the same old thing, and yet, the days are completely different from one another. One day I’m able to get dishes cleaned, laundry folded, work emails answered, and texts returned, while on a different day with the same schedule, I can barely roll out of bed to get dressed.
In trying to fix this conundrum, I figured that I would try different systems in place. I would make a checklist that would stick on my refrigerator—that’s surely going to work! Later that week, the same checklist stands without any of the boxes checked. Well, maybe I can get timers set up throughout the house to encourage ownership of their schedules! By this time next week, they’ll just turn off the timer by sweetly asking Siri to cancel it. Sticker charts, reward systems, visual routines lists, and more have all been tried and forgotten systems that end up making me feel like, well, I don’t have any of it figured out.
So the answer still is nothing new.
But that just isn’t true. I can lament all I want about my wanderings in parenthood, my affliction in, simply, trying to figure it out, but I’m met with brand new grace beyond comprehension every morning. I still have hope—a novel hope.
His mercies are new every morning (Lam. 3:23).
I don’t have to accomplish or do anything to receive God’s steadfast love.
I receive that by simply existing.
So what’s new?
His mercy is new every morning when I get through my schedule. It’s new every time I can check off everything on my checklist. But it’s also new when I’m bleary-eyed and I struggle for 5 minutes trying to put on a pair of leggings. I just hope that I continually see the beauty in finding His new morning mercies—may they always be novel to me.
