No Pretty Titles...Just my Simple Blog

Is there anything better than listening to a little child breathe?  You know that deep relaxed breathing that only comes when they fall asleep?  I was sitting here watching something cute on YouTube with Sam.  And we were even discussing it when all of a sudden I noticed that he wasn’t talking back to me anymore and that the only sound that I could hear in my bedroom was the quiet deep strum of his breathing.  I listened for a bit, thinking that I should send him off to bed and turn the T.V. on, because…well…that’s what I do at night when Jason has a dance and it’s not one that I have to go with him to help him or play one on my own and the house is so quiet without him…I fall asleep to the T.V.  But after listening a moment more to Sam I decided that I would let his little mumbles and deep breathing in his sleep relax me and fill the quiet of an otherwise still house.

So what did I do after that, you ask?  I decided to read a new favorite blog that I have, “The Matt Walsh Blog.”  Now although we don’t completely agree on everything, after all we are individuals in ourselves, mostly his thoughts are pretty close to my own, and if nothing else he is a good, god fearing man who is trying to live honestly and righteously in a world that Satan seems to be slowly winning over to his own, or maybe quickly to his own.  What did reading Matt’s blog do?  Well it got me to thinking about just how much modern society laughs at the unchangeability of God’s laws and religious belief.  Then before long I was a little depressed and even angry that such a world is the one that I live in.  After all didn’t I deserve the general goodness of the world say 100 years ago? 

Of course that led to my agonizing over my little ones and the future world that they would be raising their kids in and how much worse that it will most likely become and before long my blood pressure was rising and my anxiety growing and I had to stop contemplating for a moment to calm down only to hear Sam in the background sigh in his sleep and mumble something completely untranslatable.

And that my dear is why there is no better thing to do than to listen to a little child breathe.  Somehow in all of their innocence everything will always be all right in the world even if in reality it is not.  Why?  I don’t know.  It’s hard to remember back to being that little, but the little glimpses of memory that I have of the me of my little girl years was filled with the absolute willingness to believe that there was some amount of good in the world and in the inhabitants of that same world.  And most of all the little bit of magic that I seemed to see in everything.  I believe God gives that to children because he knows that the adults around them need that more than anything and the adults that they will someday become need to have those ever flitting memories to draw them back to peace when the world gets too tough.

Now I can’t say that anxiety and stress run my life, maybe in years past, very many years past when I was a teenager and then for a short while as a very young wife, but to say that the world around me isn’t trying very hard to pull me down would be an outright lie.  Because it is.  That’s what the world does, because Satan lives here and his most precious desire that drives him more than anything else is to bring us down.  So why is it that over the years I have become the “Glass is half full” kind of gal?  I could relate a lot of things, but in reality it’s because I take the time to listen to my children breathe, and laugh, and sing, and tell stories, and play make believe, and share moments with me as they fall asleep in my bed.  It’s because I’ve learned how to go about with an attitude of gratitude and by choosing that first my eyes seem to find the beauty in the world all around me.  It’s because I look for Christ’s love in everything everywhere I go and the harder that I look the more that I find it.  It’s because I can find joy in the simple things and in the strength that I have to live here in this world and bring a little tranquility to it along the way. 

So now I sit here in the dark.  My mind quiet and my heart beating more slowly and I contemplate sending Sam to bed, because after all that is where he needs to end up sometime in the next few hours before Jason comes home to reclaim his side of the domain, and I thank God that he gives me these little moments so often in my life when I can find gratitude and peace in the quiet rhythms of my little child’s steady breathing.  I can only imagine what he is dreaming so sweetly…but whatever it is I know just a little bit of its magic will find its way into my dreams tonight.