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Moments for Mom
By Elisabeth Corcoran, Author of Calm in My Chaos.
April 2001
"Therefore, whoever humbles {herself} like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."
Matthew 18:4
Sara, 4, had asked to pray before our breakfast this morning. That is quite typical of her. I think it’s more her penchant to take charge than her avid spiritual growth as of yet. But I happily obliged as it still does something to my heart to hear that little girl of mine talk to our heavenly Father.
She started off per usual. Thank You for mommy, thank You for daddy, thank You for Jack. Then she added, And thank You for me. She has yet to come across that place in life where you feel silly or full of yourself in bringing any sort of attention to who you are as a person. As adults, we’d probably be a bit taken aback to hear a fellow pray-er at our Bible study thank God for herself. But if you think about…I think the situation is less that she hasn’t quite learned prayer etiquette, and more that she may know more than we as grown-ups do. Why not thank God for ourselves? He made us as much as he made the other people we thank him for. We have as much value as those other people do. And I bet, if we began to sprinkle our prayers every now and then with a small ‘thank you for me’, I just bet we’d start to see our value though his eyes. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
She then moved on to the rest of her list of thanks. Sara has not yet progressed much past the thanksgiving kind of prayers. She doesn’t ask God for anything. She doesn’t confess much either. (That will need to come…) She just thanks him. And today, I noticed exactly what she was thanking him for. She went through her routine of thanking him for breakfast, and her pretty clothes, and thank You that I’m beautiful again today (no self-esteem issues with this little girl). But then I heard her saying, And thank You for dolly needing to be fixed and… Did you catch that? Because I almost didn’t. She didn’t ask God to fix her dolly. She simply thanked him for her dolly dilemma. Now, I’m sure she wasn’t hoping to teach me some huge theological lesson in that moment…but wow, did she ever. What if I stopped, just for a day even, asking God for stuff? Asking him to fix things in my life? Asking him to change this or that circumstance? What if – what if I just thanked him for all of my situations as is? How might my life be different? How might I see God and my current status differently…if instead of complaining to him or asking him for a quick-fix, I just rested where I was at that moment…searching for his hand and for any lesson I could glean…and thanked Him for it?
Maybe I’ll just have to find out.
Copyright © Elisabeth K. Corcoran, 2001. Elisabeth K. Corcoran is the author of "Calm in My Chaos: Encouragement for a Mom's Weary Soul". This column is original and not excerpted from her book. Reprinted with permission.
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