Over the eggs (borrowed from another blog)

5 Things You Need to Know Before You Begin Your 2nd Term of Life
Posted: 21 Jan 2013 08:36 AM PST

It felt like the second term to her.

Her 39 and him about 40, and the first half over, now the beginning of the second.

Or of the end — depending how you looked at it.

You don’t get to make up most of your story.

That’s what she thought at the stove over eggs, over all the cracked and broken things.

You don’t get to make him love you like you want to be loved.

You don’t get to make him listen, or laugh, or get it, or hold you.

You don’t get to make the kids avoid bent fenders, busted hearts, and mangled dreams.

You don’t get to force your life like a pot to bulbs, and you might never get to be a missionary in the mountains of Tibet, or bring a baby home from Ethiopia, or fling open the door on the life you thought you’d always have.

She picked out a broken shell from the scrambled eggs.

And everything quietly brimmed and blurred a bit over a frying pan. She hoped it looked like it was all because of onions.

Why does pain always come back again and why do parents grow old and sick and kids grow up but not any wiser? Why does a woman marry a man expecting he’ll change — and why does a man marry a woman expecting she’ll never change?

Why does no one tell you that once you start labor over a child, you’ll never stop, and you always must remember to keep breathing?

Why did she read and think and have questions at all and why was this being a woman hard and could she even say that out loud?

She scrambled the eggs.

She brushed away whatever was spilling and she scrambled the eggs.

And she took a deep breath and she smiled brave because this is how you answer His call.

You don’t get to make up most of your story. You get to make peace with it.

You don’t get to demand your life, like a given. You get to accept your life, like a gift.

Beginnings and middles, they are only yours to embrace, to unwrap like a gift.

But you get the endings. You always get the endings.

You get the endings and you get to make them a gift back to the Giver.

She told herself that, tucking falling strands behind her ear: Here wasn’t a glory to wrestle, but a grace to receive. Isn’t everything that is good always hard?

What if — She let herself  be loved whatever way her Lord deemed best.

You’ve only accepted Christ as your Lord without reservation — as much as you have accepted your life as a gift without regret.

The ending of everything is always yours.

So she made the bed and and she made his favorite omelet and service isn’t about being a doormat but about being a door for joy to walk through.

And there at the beginning of the second half —  or whatever right then was right there in the kitchen — she stood in the light and opened her hand like a reception —

and made her life an inauguration of grace.