the day before kindergarten

Lam. 2:19
Pour out your hearts like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to Him for the lives of your children. 

The night of my rehearsal dinner I cried and cried. Why I bothered to put all that makeup on I have no idea, because it was all washed away by the time my girlfriends and I settled in on my last night in my parents' home. Day of the wedding? Not a single tear. My bridesmaids were all bawling! A tear slid down from the clear blue eyes of my Dan and ran past his crooked smile. But I walked down that aisle confident, ecstatic... ready.

The day before I turned 30 the haunts of three decades of life and the scarier question of what I had done with it turned me upside down inside. I was a mess. I wondered at God's patience, mourned days lost in idleness, and wished I'd done more, been more. But by midnight, I'd surrendered it all to Him. The future, the present, AND the past. And I knew in my spirit that our best days were ahead. And so, on the day of my big 3-0 I celebrated inside and out... At peace with my journey with Him so far, at peace with my ministry as a wife of a contractor and a mom of two little girls, and excited about what God had in store for the best decades of my life.

Of course! It's the day before! But ha! It totally took me by surprise when today, the day before my baby girl Callie starts kindergarten, I lose it. It was shortly after the moment when, in the middle of a game of Go Fish, she looks up at me and says, "Ya know this is my last day at home, Mom." I've asked everyone I know to pray for me tomorrow. But it hit me: its the day before. The sinking feeling I'd ignored all morning, the heart hurt I'd felt that has no explanation... I came to my senses and realized, its the day before that's gonna be the hardest.

A precious friend of mine reminded me about Mary, momma of the Lord Jesus, and how in Luke's gospel it says she "treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." So this is likely my very shortest blog post ever. Because I've got some lasting seconds of this day to treasure, to ponder. To enjoy. Overwhelmed with gratitude to the Giver all of all good gifts, today I'm loving the gift of the day before kindergarten. I always cry when I get a really amazing, incredible surprise of a gift!