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I’ll never forget the winter of 2018.
For twenty-one days I stayed home with different combinations of sick kids, fighting off multiple illnesses in all three of them. It was an unprecedented experience, unequaled in all of my years of motherhood then or since.
It was a crazy flu year in Texas that year. I spent all of February watching my kids carefully, waking up multiple times a night to check on whichever one I felt was most likely to be dying. It was exhausting and stressful and brought me to my knees more than once.
Emerald was the second one to get the dreaded flu, which was followed by a sinus infection, which was followed by what the doctor believes is another round of a different strain of the flu. It was so rampant that the clinic and hospital ran out of flu screens, so we could only guess as to which virus struck her down the third time.
It all sounds very dramatic, but in truth the entire month was spent playing a million rounds of Uno, watching a zillion movies starring preteens, and scrounging for food in a nearly bare refrigerator. In short, the month of February completely passed me by.
The fact is that I had big plans for my month. I was going to get a lot of writing accomplished. I was going to keep regular work hours and really dig into some projects and enter March feeling like I had done some good thinking, some good writing, making good progress on the things I feel like God is calling me to do. I didn’t do any of that. But it isn’t because I wasn’t fulfilling my calling.
Proverbs 16:9 tell us that in her heart a person may plan her course, but the Lord determines her steps.
I thought my big work for the month of February would be related to my writing, but God reminded me in those 21 days that I have been blessed with the privilege of being my kids’ mother. It is a job that will chew you up and spit you out, that will leave you weeping from exhaustion, that will cause you to wring your hands when the coughing won’t stop, that will find you sneaking into rooms just to count the number of breaths that a child is taking.
That February was long and trying and caused me to lean heavily on my Savior, forced me to pray for my children with a passion that I sometimes lack, helped me to see that sometimes big work is little: drinks of water in a special princess cup, lists of medicine schedules, letting snuggly children cough in your face.
The Lord determines our steps, and my February steps went a whole bunch of nowhere. Yet, somehow I found my Jesus there, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the mess, in the middle of the great honor and blessing of motherhood.
The hardest days are the ones that drive me straight into His arms. And that is never a bad thing. I’m thankful that’s where He led me in the month of February in 2018. Little did I know that Covid would be arriving in our part of the world just a couple years later, another opportunity for God to rearrange my priorities and remind me how much I need Him.
He is so good to show Himself to me during flu season and during every season. His love never changes, never stops reaching for us, never gives up on us in our busy-ness.
I am so grateful for the calling of being a mother, for the calling of being a wife, for the calling of being a writer.
I trust His timing and His plan for all the seasons, flu or otherwise.
He is love, He is healing, and He is peace.