Chief Executive Mom

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Lately I have felt as though my children, home, husband, family, friends and responsibilities were all attached to me by a million little strings that I drag around through my day with a weight comparable to a mini-van. When I try to imagine the freedom I crave, I think of backpacking. I love to hike 6 miles straight up the side of a mountain onto an alpine meadow with a 40 pound pack. I know that might sound strange to you, but there is no feeling so gloriously free as reaching the top utterly exhausted, only to drop your pack and run across the meadow beneath rugged snow glittered peaks in air so crisp and clean you believe you have never truly breathed before. You are far too tired to have any though or care other than to ravenously drink in the awesome beauty around you. There is simplicity in freedon.

If I am honest, there are moments when I think I want someone to take my kids and send me to ‘go take a hike”, a long one. But every mother knows life after baby cannot ever be the same as it was. There is no escaping the constant responsibility and care a mother feels for her child. If God answered my careless request, would I find freedom in the loss of my "children, home, husband, family, friends and responsibilities"? Do I really want to be rid of all those things? There was a time when I did live my life so as to be as unattached to anyone or anything as possible. It was a very cold, lonely, miserable season for me. I often forget the heavy, aching loneliness I carried around before I picked up the lively mini-van.

I don’t know if I will ever this side of heaven fully understand why God has been so gracious to me as to heal my mind and turn my dark thoughts toward knowledge of Him. But as He gently heals and mends me, the daily things I most want to complain about become my deepest blessings. We as mothers have been given an incredible blessing that has the potential like nothing else to push us toward true emancipation. There is nothing like a precious needy little bundle to stage a coup d’etat against the dictatorial rule of self-centeredness. Bono wrote in a recent U2 song, “freedom has a scent, like the top of a newborn baby’s head” (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, “Miracle Drug”). That lyric has haunted me since I first heard it. Haunted me. (Click on this link, you must hear it!) I can’t get it out of my head. Do you remember the intoxicating scent of your newborn’s head? It seemed to cast all practical reason from my head and fill it with inexplicable adoration. From an objective standpoint, it seems almost silly to love a creature so much that your heart could break, only 5 minutes after that little person was born! Why, you hardly know him! He just caused you 9 months of inconvenience and quite a few hours of pain! But with the birth of a child, your heart has broken. When God gives you a child, He deals a hefty blow to the self-protecting walls of your heart. It’s almost as though the Lord yanks you up by your collar and firmly plants you onto a well-worn but narrow path marked by the sign, “This way to freedom”. Perhaps this also is what Paul meant in 1 Tim. 2:25, “a woman will be saved in childbearing.”