As a mother, I have often felt as if my sensory receptors are short circuiting.  It usually happens at about the time I am pretty sure I just stepped on a Lego that I already picked up twice on my way to referee a squall that has most certainly awakened the dead.  In a few brief moments I get a flash of life before children, followed by a version of what I thought motherhood would “look” like (usually a Maria von Trapp-esque sublime moment, happily instructing a crowd of patient cherubs).   And then I am quickly dragged into the ACTUAL present moment in which I’m probably still wearing the tank top I slept in, yoga pants with smears of someone else’s lunch, and I am mumbling something ferocious and unintelligible.  Not how I really want to be seen and certainly not what I have posted on Facebook.

Glennon Melton has a blog that is currently spreading like wildfire, and for good reason.  Momastery is brilliant and, to use her term, “brutiful.”  The first treasure I found was, “Telling Secrets,” about the healing that comes, for us and others, by simply being honest about who we are and where we have been.  In “Don’t Carpe Diem,” Glennon talks about the challenging moments of motherhood and the moments that make it worth the challenge. “Chronos is the hard, slow passing time we parents often live in…Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. Kairos is those magical moments in which time stands still.”  The beauty of stopping in the midst of the chaos and realizing, “This is the first time I’ve really seen Tish all day, and my God – she is so beautiful. Kairos”

Which naturally led me to thinking about how God looks at his own children.  What if He always sees us in Kairos time?  As we are meant to be, as He created us to be?  A different reality altogether.  Not the idealized version of ourselves, but something even more beautiful.

Or maybe the spin cycle of motherhood is used to smooth out the jagged edges?  Or maybe they aren’t supposed to be smoothed out at all, but to fit perfectly with the other broken pieces.   A mosaic in the making.  We all have moments when we fail, when we feel “less than.”   We lose our tempers.  We choose to focus on what we don’t have, rather than what we do.  We have thoughts and pasts and regrets that we wish we could undo. And yet, grace.  Unmerited favor.  Unconditional love.

What if he sees us without the scars, the fear, and anger?  Without the hurt and disappointment?  What if He sees past the barriers and walls we have carefully built over time and thinks we are so beautiful.  Even in crusty pants and in our less than stellar parenting moments.  Maybe he put us here, in this time, this place, to love others with jagged pieces, a little more smoothly.  To give ourselves and others a little more grace.