sticky pages

On Saturday I returned home from January's prayer retreat. Bear and I try to give each other 24 hours each month as time away to pray. This retreat was dedicated to reviewing 2007 through reading my journals and evaluating my day timer. It takes a good bit of time but it's an enriching reality-check for me. Where did I REALLY invest my time? Did I focus on the goals I laid before God in prayer at the beginning of the year? And, as Henri Nouwen asked, "Did growing older bring be closer to Jesus?"

2007 was a hard, fruitful year. As a family we had over 30 doctor's visits, 3 ER runs, numerous urgent care appointments, and 2 surgeries. We've experienced colonoscopies, MRIs, diabetes screening, knee surgery, and sleep apnea monitors. We laughed on road trips, held hands on date nights, cuddled on Friday nights (we have a family tradition each Friday of movie night on the floor), and we all spent Valentine's Day together playing at a smancy hotel. We rejoiced when Louie began to crawl, beamed when Keona took her first ballet lesson, cried when Jonathan's emotional strength began to crumble, and prayed while Daddy had an angiogram.

Sometime, somehow in the midst of it all it occurred to me that--in my sincere appreciation for great writers and speakers of old--I had never once asked myself what their children thought of them. Why is that? Their writing has enriched me decades and centuries past their death. But did their lives enrich their children? Would their children testify that they were "open books"?

I'm not sure what people will say in years to come about my writings. But I am certain that all that put together won't be as eternally weighty as the testimony of those who lived with me. I pray that the pages of my life are saturated with the slobbery, sticky kisses and touches of my family. That in the end they would say without hesitation, "Mommy lived what she wrote and wrote what she lived. She was a lover of Jesus."