We just got back from our first vacation with Samuel. After hauling his pack and play, strollers, toys and highchairs to the beach, I quickly realized that vacation with a small child is not vacation at all, but it's really just a change of scenery.
This may be slightly oversimplifying, but Mandee and I were talking about how life changes are sometimes really just changes of scenery.
Being the mother of Samuel is a change of scenery on steroids... love, surprise, exhaustion, smiles, frustration, messes... all in massive doses. But at the end of the day, it’s not just about me and my experience. It’s whether or not I loved well in my experience... loved my baby, and all the other folks I’ve encountered, which are not exclusive because I cannot love my baby well while being oblivious to the needs around me. I’m not talking about the sentimental kind of love that’s all warm and sweet, but the kind of love that considers and then follows in action. I’m not so good at it, but as Krista Tippett says, “Love is not the starting point but the goal. It is not something we are born knowing how to do, not something we fall into, it is something we spend our whole lives learning.”
So as we’re learning to love, hoping to love well... husbands, baby, music, the earth and all of it’s people, love is the constant and everything else is just a change of scenery. “Brothers and sisters, let’s love each other, because love comes from God... God is love. If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” (from 1 John 4)
The night I found out I was pregnant, I lived in Nashville while Mandee was living in East Tennessee, 4 1/2 hours away. I called her at 11pm my time, which was midnight her time. She got off the phone and wrote the song, “Can’t Keep From Singing.” http://listn.to/alathea/player#t=0&pos=0&p=5
Our friend told her little girl that the song is about Samuel, and she said, “I don’t get it, it’s not about a baby.” Maybe not literally, but it’s about an answer to a prayer that we haven’t thought to pray, and it’s about peace when this new change of scenery is coming, when we don’t have any idea what tomorrow will look like, except that we’ll be in it, trying to make sense of it with our faith and our songs, learning to love in the moment.
