God is in the Mondays

Monday

Some days you wake up and it’s a beautiful Hallmark movie morning.  It’s all bright daffodils and doves cooing in the trees and finches in the bird bath. The first poppies are blooming. It is spring and you see how God is in all of it.

Other days you cannot wake up when the alarm goes off.  You hit snooze, and snooze, and snooze again. When you finally do get up, you are (not surprisingly) running late. All the normal morning things still need to be done, but now you don’t have time to do them. Your son has just started to have a basically regular school day again (hurrah!), so for the first time in nearly a year he has to bring lunch to school (Not hurrah!).

Confession: it’s not your favorite thing, the daily lunch making. Yes, you know, you could delegate this job to him. You should delegate this job to him. But that hasn’t happened yet

So it is Monday, and you snoozed many times, but you finally stumble to the kitchen, and start to make the lunch, pulling all the lunch things out of the refrigerator, when you suddenly, sadly, realize that nobody (meaning: your sweet son) remembered to empty out the lunch sack with Friday’s school lunch in it, so since it is Monday, all the dirty containers have been mouldering in his backpack all weekend. Now they are not so pleasant and they need to be washed and dried before fresh food can be packed. It’s a bother.

But somehow, everybody gets dressed, and just as you are heading out the door, maybe a few minutes late, but not hopelessly behind, you snap at him again, this person that you love more than your life itself, because he forgot to give you a paper that needed to be signed (an important paper from the school!), and when he does give it to you, it is wrinkled! So wrinkled!  It looks like it has been run over by a car. You try to fix it by weighing it down with a vase and a heavy candle in the crazy hope that in a few seconds it might miraculously transform into a flat, not crumpled paper. This child of your heart! It doesn’t work. The paper is still a mess. But you sign it, and it goes in the backpack with all the other wrinkled papers, and as you are really heading out the door, all the last minute questions correctly answered (“Do you have your Chromebook? A mask? Your charger? That paper?”),  he says (a little hesitantly, because he rightly sees that you are in a bit of a mood), “The cat threw up.”

Sure enough. There on the floor, there is a pile of. You know.

But he’s such a nice cat! Surely, he wouldn’t do such a thing, would he? Oh yes. Yes he would.

No time to clean it.  You will get it later, you tell him.

God is in this, too.

Thankfully, the car starts (a grace. It didn’t have to. Not that there was anything wrong with the car that made you fear it wouldn’t start. It has been that kind of a morning, though. The kind where the car doesn’t start).

You make it to school on time. Barely. But good enough. He heads into his yoga class with his lunch, his Chromebook, a mask (huzzah for the mask! It is the one thing that both of you consistently forget), and the important paper. You listen to a helpful podcast on the drive home and once there, realize there is still time for a cup of tea. With cream. You clean up the cat mess, and the dog returns to his customary place on the red couch.

You remember that God is in all of it.

God loved you through your morning grumpiness, from the moment you just could not get up when the alarm went off, through the dirty lunch dishes, and the lunch making, and the rumpled paper, and the cat mess. God is there, and in the blooming pinkness of the forsythia outside the window. In the leaves unfolding on the twiggy Japanese maple tree that you planted years ago, but maybe is starting to feel at home here, enough to grow a bit. The sun pours through the front windows and lights up the kitchen table. This Monday. This day. This gift.