Early morning reflection

This morning our 3 year old son walked into our bedroom and quietly woke me up with, "Mama, my leg is hurting." He sometimes has 'growing pains' in his little calf muscles. So i rubbed his little muscles and asked him to go back to sleep. It was 5:44am. He returned several minutes later with the same complaint. This time i rubbed him and realized his jammies were damp, so now i'm wide awake and taking him to the bathroom to give him pain medicine and change his clothes. He enjoyed the sweet medicine and wanted to sleep naked, so i sent him to his bed while i took care of his things.

Now i'm laying in bed, awake but tired. My mind is thinking about how these nightly interruptions occur with such consistent regularity that if i get a whole night's sleep without being woken, i feel more tired than when i don't. It's as if my body is accustomed to little sleep, so a good night's sleep actually makes my body realize what it's been missing..... But after a moment of restfulness and hope that my son was not going to come back into the room, i felt the cotton covers touching my chin. Any complaint or negativity about not being able to fall back asleep vanished: I wasn't fearful of my life. I am not in a refugee camp. No one has raped me. I am not hungry. I have a home. God has given me beautiful children. I am warm....

It was a moment of connecting with the oneness of our humanity that enabled me to stop being self-consumed by an inconvenience. How dare i grumble when my brothers and sisters are facing insurmountable and extremely difficult physical challenges in the face of poverty, war, natural disasters, etc. In a moment i felt grateful and content.

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