It’s Gonna Be A Warm Night

This is my son, Dylan.

He just turned 6 and finished Kindergarten. Be still my Mamma heart. I could just eat those ears right up.  

(Don’t even talk to me about the “cake” made from Krispy Kreme donuts. It made all his dreams come true, AND, considering it took me 5 minutes to pile up, it made my dreams come true too. Poorganic rationalization: After we de-towered it to eat, most of the donuts got trashed.)

I know. I should apologize for having one kid who absorbed such a large amount of the cuteness on the planet, but he did do THIS . . . for the first six months of his life, so I honestly still feel like maybe we are just now breaking even.

On top of being the most precious little boy on the planet, he’s pretty funny too. He has all these adorable little boy quirks, one of which is an obsession with making sure he picks the appropriate outfit for the weather of the day.  Every morning when he trots off to his room to get dressed, he says, “Is it going to be WARM, HOT, or COLD today?” and I answer him with the forecast weather. Then he can chose the appropriate combination of Super Hero long or short-sleeved T-shirt and pants or shorts. Normally, he opts for monochromatic, but every now and then, he switches things up and throws in some camo.

ANYWHOOOOO, his concern for seasonal attire can be kind of cute in the morning, but when bedtime rolls around he often goes through the same questioning.

Mom, Dad, is it going to be WARM, HOT, or COLD tonight?

And, as we have central air, climate controlled to 76 degrees Fahrenheit, we answer, It’s going to be a warm night, Dyl.

The next night. Mom, is it going to be WARM, HOT, or COLD tonight?

One of us will patiently answer, Dyl, our house is always the same temperature inside. It’s going to be warm.

The next night, pre-jammie selection. Dad, is it going to be WARM, HOT, or COLD tonight?

In unison, Jeremy and I chant, “WARM NIGHT!! It’s always a WARM NIGHT!!”

Finally, the other night, I overheard Jeremy tell Dylan that he was going to make him a chart so that he would always know which jammies to select.

What a great, patient dad he is! I thought to myself, but I didn’t think of checking the chart to see what system of meteorological aid he’d devised for our 6 year old.

A day or so later I was in Dylan’s room doing something, and I happened to see what I can only conclude was the “chart.”

Don’t you know that I laughed out loud at my clever husband and my funny son? Captain Obvious in the house, y’all. It’s always a warm night. It’s written on the wall.

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(Have you figured out the line above is my substitution for an artfully written segue? Ain’t nobody got time for that.)

The last few months, I’m gonna be honest, I’ve been in a spiritual slump. Last August my church closed, which it turns out, is a really, really crappy thing to have happen. I’ve been missing it, my Bible studies, my “normal.” But I haven’t done a great job of going to the Lord about my grief and frustration–or really anything.

I’ve kind of whined about it.

 And then I decided to watch Netflix shows instead. For like six months.  Pretty addictively.

I don’t know if it is a depression, or dark night of the soul, or what.  I’ve been kind of living in a very complacent, lazy way. Truthfully, I think I’ve been kind of waiting to see if God would notice how absent I’ve been from our relationship and then beat me up about it.  Since I’ve basically always been a pretty “good girl” (not even sure which of a dozen good girl posts I could link to that phrase, so here’s one), I couldn’t really think of a time when I’d done so little for the Lord, tried so little for the Lord, been so useless for the Lord.  

Even though I might verbally say and mentally know that God’s love for me doesn’t change, in the midst of my dark place, I didn’t believe that. I believed He was disappointed in my laziness. My failure to seek Him. My avoidance of His Word. I believed He wanted me to get my $*%^ together and apologize for being so immature.

Which I guess means that deep, deep down, I have a pretty messed up view of God and how he feels about me. His Spirit within me kept telling me, “I’m not disappointed in you. I just miss you.”

But, I didn’t know what to do with that exactly.

There’s no doubt that some of what I went through this winter was seasonal because, no kidding, when spring came, I felt like a big dark cloud lifted.  I decided to try to start writing again and resume doing Letter Verses, a Scripture memory program to raise money for The Seed Company.    I picked a different “N-verse” last fall, but it was too long for my kids, so I decided to chose the verse that had been resonating in my mind since the winter. 

Y’all, there’s a place in that tiny print where it says “neither death nor life . . . . can separate us from God’s love.”

Previously, I think I had always focused on the death part of that phrase, but I realized, I mistakenly believed MY LIFE–the way I live–will separate me from God’s love.

Will living badly, sinfully, or just plain complacently separate me from God’s love?

No. No. NOTHING can ever separate us from God’s love. (It’s N-verse, People!)

Now, the way I live may separate me from His power, victory over sin, and the peace that passes all understanding.  Those things I have definitely been missing out on, but God’s love never changes.

God’s love is a WARM NIGHT.

You don’t need to ask. You don’t need to worry. You can wear the same jammies EVERY. DURN. TIME.

Unlike our AC, which might give out and result in Dylan-panic, the warm, constant, forgiving, merciful, gracious love of God is continuous. His words can be posted on the wall of our hearts. We don’t need a chart.

Romans 8:38 (NLT)