"Cherish These Moments"

Every now and then I want to write a blog reflecting on the blessing and joy of motherhood. On Valentine's Day my husband and I had a romantic evening away just the two of us...oh, make that three of us (breastfeeding baby in tow). While it started out rough, with a crying screaming baby because mom wasn't smart enough to realize that getting her first four vaccinations should NOT take place on Valentine's Day, it brightened soon after. Baby stopped crying...after some prayer...and we had a pleasant drive to a beautiful place - Westmont College, my alma-mater, where we took a lovely stroll through the amazing flora of the hills of Montecito, California. I had prayed that God would give us "surprise blessings" during the evening, and we had our first one soon after stepping out of the car into Westmont. As we were walking down the path, we spotted Ben Patterson, the campus pastor and our friend. We stopped to say hi, and he ended up praying a blessing over our little Hannah Hope, and speaking some words of wisdom to us.

He told us to "cherish these moments, because they are precious and they go so quickly." Its not like I never think about how quickly my children will grow up, because I see it happening everyday before my eyes. But something about him saying it the way he did, at that moment in my life, struck me. It could have been the screaming and crying we had just recovered from, or the frantic rushing to get out of the house with baby and all her belongings in tow, or the several dirty diapers I had just changed that made that moment such a stunning contrast to everything else in my life. But whatever it was, it struck me. In the midst of all the chaos, all the crying, all the diapers, all the rushing from this to that, we must stop...and remember the precious and sacred moments we are living in, the moments of caring for these little gifts, these helpless, adorable, innocent (or not so innocent) children that we've been given. We must cherish these moments, because they will be gone much more quickly than I think we realize. We joke about how it will be only tomorrow when we are sending them off to college, or watching them walk down the aisle...but something tells me, when we are doing these things, it will feel like only yesterday that we were holding them in our arms or changing their diaper. And we will probably shed a small tear, remembering the treasured moments of when they were so little, small, and precious.

And so as we find ourselves today in the moments of life, full of both the treasured and the terrifying, the holy and the hectic, let us remember to often pause and reflect on how precious these moments really are...because, whether we like it or not, they will indeed go by so fast.