Tock

Milo: Who are you?

Tock: My name is Tock. I'm a watchdog.

--The Phantom Tollbooth

I'm writing to distract myself from 1) the peanut butter oatmeal cinnamon cookies I made "for the Husband" and 2) what may or may not be serious contractions, so forgive me if the piece is a bit disjointed today.

For the quote above to make sense, you have to understand that Tock is a WATCHdog, i.e. a dog who has a built-in watch. He watches over time, and is highly offended when Milo says he's "just killing time" because, you see, time is a gift. (Tock is the sensible one in the book; I aspire to be like Tock but I'm afraid I identify more with the Humbug, who thinks the answer to every math problem is "17.")

I've been thinking about time, specifically the rhythm your days get into when you are the mommy of a Miss Boo and (currently) a miserable little black dog who wouldn't believe you when you told him it was raining, and it wasn't worth it to go out into the yard to see if the bone he ate yesterday magically reappeared. It occurred to me that time is a gift; without time, we wouldn't get rhythm.

Rhythm is, I think, why God created us in time in the first place. Our souls are eternal, but we have beginnings and so we experience eternity as a series of events. Every year God gives us spring, but it's a different spring; every day, God gives me waking up, going to sleep, three meals and my little round of chores. Every day these things are the same, but they're also different every day. As a sinful human my temptation is to either crave absolute steadyness ("I hate change!") or absolute novelty ("I'm bored!"), neither of which is appropriate for me. It's easy to see that it would be silly to ask for either of these things in the stuff we obviously can't control, like the weather, but it's hard for me to remember day-to-day that I can't control little stuff either.

So God gives me rhythm in my days as well as rhythm in my years and rhythm in the pews (I mean the church year, but that's a nice little music reference for those of you who know which album I'm talking about), to remind me of His goodness, His creativity (Who else would make all the crocuses different from each other and different from last year?), and His mercy. Every time the rhythm changes from autumn to winter, from abundance to dryness, from a feast to a fast, I get the chance to exercise my faith and remember, He is the one who'll bring us around to summer again.

All this brought on by realizing I've done laundry on Mondays now so long I can't remember when I last got through a Monday without washing something. So there you have it; housewives can be philosphers, too. :)

Hope you all are enjoying a rhythmic day,

Cheers,

Breanna