The warm way he’d talked cutsie with the girl in pink and pigtails, I figured he loved children.  “Do you have any of your own?” I asked the grocery clerk with the plugs in his ears.  Well, that was a shocking question and he couldn’t exclaim vehemently enough that no way was he having any, he was a musician and he was making his way and he wasn’t going to let anything interfere and this was his time to emerge and maybe someday but he had plenty of time for that seeing he was only 24.  He did, however, think it was ultracool that I lived next door to the guy who started Death Cab for Cutie way back when his mother wasn’t sure he’d ever make anything of himself because his music practice was so outside the box that his piano teacher about went mad over his free form improvisation.

Let’s face it, our culture does not embrace the beauty and wonder of its children.  Maybe collectively, corporately, disdains, moreso than the individual adorable girl in pink and pigtails, but nonetheless, we ought to recognize it for what it is.  Why should a mother of five, or eight, or fourteen, feel like she has too many children?  Too many arrows in the hands of  a warrior?   Too many olive branches around the table?  Too many to whom belong the kingdom of heaven?  Too many beautiful fruit?  What about the biblical language of the blessings of children do we not understand, within our churches today?  To know the individual personalities of each soul, to delight in their God-given quirks and humor and high calling, is to begin to be thinking God’s thoughts after Him.  For He “rejoices over us with gladness…and singing” (Zeph. 3).  Should we do any less with the precious ones entrusted to our care for a few fleeting years?  And what pleasure do we deny ourselves to fail to delight in what He delights in?  “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,”  says the Lord…”For you shall go out with joy, and be led out with peace.”  Isaiah 55:8, 12

Elisabeth Elliott speaks to the drudgery of the early child-rearing years (yes, it is a lot of work):

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt 11:29).  He is willing to bear our burdens with us, if only we will come to Him and share the yoke, His yoke...

“Everything [in a busy family-she was describing a chaotic Sunday morning rush] is the King’s Business, which He looks on in loving sympathy and understanding, for, as Baron VonHugel said, “The chain of cause and effect which makes up human life, is bisected at every point by a vertical line relating us and all we do to God.”  This is what He has given us to do, this task here on this earth, not the task we aspired to do but this one.  The absurdities involved cut us down to size.  The great discrepancy between what we envisioned and what we’ve got force us to be real.  And God is our great Reality, more real than the realest of earthly conditions, an unchanging Reality.  It is His providence that has put us where we are.  It’s where we belong.  It is for us to receive it – all of it—humbly, quietly, thankfully.

Sunday morning, the Lord’s Day [or Monday to Friday in the routine], can be the very time when everything seems so utterly unrelated to the world of the Spirit that it is simply ridiculous.  Yet to the Lord’s lovers it is only a seeming.  Everything is an affair of the spirit.  Everything, to one who loves God and longs with a sometimes desperate longing for a draught of Living Water, a single touch of His hand, a quiet word—everything, I say, can be seen in His perspective.

Does He watch? Yes, “Thou God seest me” (Gen 16:3).  Is His love surrounding us? “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3).  “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee” (Heb 13:5).  May I offer to Him my feeling of the dislocation between reality and my ideals, that great chasm which separates the person I long to be, the work I long to do for Him, the family I struggle to perfect for His glory—from the actuality?  I may indeed, for it is God Himself who stirs my heart to desire, and he can easily see across the chasm.  He enfolds all of it, He is at work in me and in those I pray for, “to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Phil 2:13).  I may take heart, send up an instant look of gratitude, and—well, get that beloved flock into the van and head down the freeway singing!”  

--from Keep A Quiet Heart