Picture, if you will, my house on a Sunday morning. Ignore the large pile of laundry on the couch – be grateful it’s clean, and not dirty. We’re all bathed (a Herculean feat) and we’ve managed to find something to eat (also a miracle, as half the children don’t like to eat what the other half like, and finding meals to please the whole family and that aren’t pizza is like finding something . . . well, something really hard to find.)
We all get our shoes on and get into the van. Someone is sad because they weren’t the first one to get into the van and chances are they will not be the first one to get out. We’ll ignore the fact that being first is not all it’s cracked up to be – when that’s your heart’s desire, that’s all there is to it.
We get to church and find our seats. The exact minute we sit, the two-year-old starts wiggling and squirming, making his Gerald McBoing-Boing noises. He can talk, he just likes sound effects better. We try to shush him, but he won’t be shushed, and I take him out into the lobby, where he proceeds to fold his arms and look angelic during the Sacrament prayer. I take him back in after the Sacrament, and he keeps it up with the noises.
Meanwhile, the six-year-old has decided that not only is it a grave injustice that he wasn’t first out of the van, but that he should get to sit right next to Daddy, and he’s willing to punch for the right to do so. I pass my husband in the aisle, him pulling the six-year-old out, me bringing the two-year-old in.
Then the eight-year-old announces that he needs to go to the bathroom, which I know full well is a ruse to get out of the chapel. The eleven-year-old is sitting in the middle, looking put-upon, and at one point says, “Why can’t my brothers be as well-behaved as I am?” Yeah, sister, if I had the answer to that one . . .
We make it through Sacrament Meeting with only four repetitions of the question, “When will this be over?” The two and the six are out in the hallway with their daddy while I keep the 8 and the 11. At the close of the meeting, I gratefully turn the children over to their respective teachers only to be hunted down by the nursery leader (2 was poopy) and the CTR teacher (6 had run off.)
Believe it or not, I did finally make it to Relief Society, and I even caught a few snatches of Sunday School. But what I find even more unbelievable is how, even though I was dashing to and fro, chasing this child and changing that child, putting one in time out and scowling a warning at another, I was still able to feel the Spirit. There are days when I wonder why I even bothered to get in my church clothes and come out – I mean, I could yell at my children at home just as easily as I could at church, and I wouldn’t even have to put my makeup on to do it. But Heavenly Father reached into the middle of that chaos and gave my soul what it needed today, which was the strength to get up in the morning and do it all over again. And oh, do I ever need that strength.
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