June 19, 2013

a homemade life

I could use a cake mix.  I could, and no one would blame me.  I have four kids.  I live in Asia where butter costs more than putting gas in the car (well, not quite, but almost).  I have every excuse in the world to use a cake mix.

But I won't.

I could have settled for a B-average in high school.  I could have, and my life would have probably turned out exactly as it has.  But I didn't settle, and I'm glad I didn't.  On really hard days as a wife and mom, when I've failed all five of them miserably, the fact that I got A's in high school - the fact that I knocked it out of the park, so the speak - helps me feel better about myself.

It really kinda does.

I could have chosen a different life.  I could have stayed single (which would have been easier), and I could have stayed childless (which would have been MUCH easier), and I could have stayed in America (which would have been a WHOLE LOT easier).  I could be living there now, successful and rich, obsessing over my wardrobe and my figure, decorating and redecorating my one-person house.

But how sad that kind of life would be!  No fudgy, homemade cakes gobbled up by loved-ones around my (rather scratched and crayon-marked) table.  No Lego towers on display in the guest bath vanity.  No love letters from Jubilee taped to my bedroom door.  No handsome, Godly man to love me all the days of my life, passing gas in the bed and making me laugh.  No flowing purple dress to wear on date nights with my husband (a dress purchased for next-to-nothing from a brown, wrinkled street vendor in the din of grimy Bangkok). 

No thanks.

I don't want a life void of these things.  I want to live; and to live means to bump up against people, get dirty, get heartbroken, and make a mess of the kitchen.  It means adopting when it would be a heck of a lot easier not to.  It means forgetting about money and status and ease; and living, instead, for love, for honor, and for the glory of G0D.

Because in the end, when my life is over, I want to look back and know that I knocked it out of the park.  A B-average life just won't do.  And even if it doesn't matter to anybody else whether or not I used a cake mix, it matters to me.

And that is reason enough.
Cooking out on our roof.  In my purple dress.