That time you took a summer blog hiatus to spend more time interacting with your people than writing about them.
Followed by that time you just never returned to the blog because it turns out practicing presence with precious, perpetually-growing-up people and their super fun and fantastic friends is WAY “mo’ betta,” as Super-Spouse would say, than writing way-too-long love notes to the internet.
Guilty.
Last week, I picked up my 7th grade Odyssey-team-turned-virtual-co-op-turned-back-Odyssey team in Mom Beast Bus after school.
“Mrs. Cuthrell,” they all started simultaneously exclaiming as they talked over each other while loading their chrome books and instruments and book bags and lunch boxes and all.the.things. that make me the most hated woman in the this-van-will-never-move-because-she-just-took-home-half-of-the-lunch-room car line. “We pulled up your blog in class! We got everyone to subscribe! Their only question is, why have you not written anything since June?!” (Self-imposed take-away: I mean, it’s not like you have a real job!)
Hello, Ms. Masley’s entire 7th grade classroom. So nice to meet you! That would be because I’m a former journalist who thought she could become a blogger but who Jesus then called instead to be an incessant driver of humans in 15-passenger vans. And also a grocery store frequent flyer. Because Aldi carts are not big enough for an entire week of food in this all-boy home.
Where does my week go now that I’m unemployed and have four superheroes in school for the very first time ever?
Great question. I have no idea.
Monday is grocery day, which includes all the meal planning, couponing, shopping, unloading, washing, cutting and dinner prepping for the week. By the time I clean out the fridge and wipe back down the counters after hard boiling the last of 300 million dozen eggs (because “love” in this all-boy house is spelled F-O-O-D), these people I just dropped off for some reason need picked back up. And the race to tae kwon do and cross country and music lessons begins. (Thank God for a saint of a mama. One of my best adult tricks was somehow convincing my mommy to bring dinner to my house every Monday night before she teaches all four boys some sort of music lesson. Seventh grade students, take notes so you, too, can weasel your mommy into cooking for you in adulthood.)
Tuesday is service day, which means helping with middle school band tutoring before the sun comes up. It’s Band Boosters duties day and Moore Good News! proofreading day and Odyssey of the Mind prep day and meal delivery day and completing-responsibilities-for-whatever-random-Sign-Up-Genius-showed-up-in-my-email-box day. By the time I drop two kids at PT/OT/speech and pick another one up from cross country, it’s time to drive another kid to the soccer field and rush home to make the sub-par dinner my people will surely complain about (sheetpan veggies is a sure-fire objector bet), because cooking is not my life’s gifting.
Depending on the week, I then get to spend a couple hours with the most amazing Spicy Parking Lot Bible Study ladies (yes, that is our actual name — I have a custom tumbler Miss Gina made me to prove it), but not always, because although this feisty group of mamas started meeting in cross country parking lots while we waited to pick up our kids, we have now upgraded our lives and sometimes even meet in HOMES on NON-LAWN CHAIRS! We’ve gotten fancy. We just haven’t figured out how to work around all these people who call us “Mom” in order to meet the same day and time every week.
Wednesday is late start day for Super-Spouse every other week, and after an entire lifetime of military separation, there is no way in Pluto we are using that morning for anything but Reservoir runs and quaint coffee shop dates, the kind that don’t involve small humans calling our names or stealing food off our plates. Super-Spouse heads to work before lunch, and I turn turbo mode on the two Bible studies I get to help administrate/coordinate but inevitably wait until the last second to complete. (“Oh, chapter four? Yes, I can tell you exactly what’s on page 56 because I read it in the parking lot right before I walked in.”) Then there’s more tae kwon do and usually a cross country meet that requires driving 40 minutes to stand on a field where I unashamedly get to run around like a maniac and yell for the kids I now just count as my second children for a sum total of two of the 16 to 30 minutes it takes them to run the 5K course (which is, ironically, one of my very favorite things in my adult world), followed by bus pick-up (because driving your own child home from a meet to save the extra trip to the high school and back would be too easy for parents who love the rising cost of gas), followed by youth group, 1st grade reading logs, book snuggling sessions and homework oversight.
Thursday was supposed to be a reserved writing day. After band tutoring in the morning and a real shower (yes, Padawan, when you become big people, showers are something you have to schedule around transporting all the little people who ironically hate hygiene and yet get prioritized above your own), I was supposed to act like a real live adult and actually use my journalism degree for some kind of productive activity that involves my computer and my adult brain. I was praying about writing a book, or at the very least, a single blog entry, but instead what have I written?
Only this year’s Christmas card.
(A note to the cheap, young Jedi, when you write and order your cards in October, you can both purchase Groupons for them at 50 percent off and ALSO mail them the day before Thanksgiving in November and enjoy the entire holiday season without a stamp in sight!)
Because it turns out, people are way more life-giving than productivity, and using your self-allotted writing time to instead love on people and be loved by people (listen, only the VERY BEST of soulmate-sister friends call an emergency mama co-op love-and-lattes meeting in a park the day after you return from your dying grandpa’s bedside after sleeping in an assisted living facility parking lot in a Prius and proceed to make you laugh until you cry) is a FAR richer way to spend the day than sitting in front of the computer. And is a way better way to ensure this girl looks anything like Jesus before she picks up HER people.
Thursday afternoons then turn into trumpet lessons and soccer practices and cross country practices, and, by the time I get home for Taco Thursday (as cooked weekly by Superhero 2, because we believe in slave labor in this house), I have no functional blog words left. By golly, it’s 8 p.m., and by the time I kiss my man and listen to Superhero 4’s book and clean up the tornado that happens when four humans return from school and dump every.blessed.paper in every.blessed.place in this house, I need to crawl into bed before I turn into a pumpkin. It’s usually 9 p.m. by then, and what could you possibly expect from me at that ungodly hour?
Fridays kick off with 6:30 a.m. cross country practice (because Coach loves a good parent challenge) followed by last-day-of-the-week, barely-keeping-our-heads-above-water drop-offs. By the time I finish Friday morning walking Bible study (yes, we walk a two-mile loop while discussing one chapter of our Bible study book while simultaneously pushing strollers and prodding preschoolers, because road marching our littles seemed like a good idea when we came up with this concept during a deployment six years ago), I have just enough time to shower, process all the mail from the week, pay our bills, drop by the dry cleaner’s, stop at the store (for maybe the 8th time since Grocery Run Monday), hit up the post office and pick up the house before I pick up the aforementioned Odyssey team in my 15-passenger van from school. We meet for two hours of Spontaneous practice on the porch before big kids come home and we crash with our favorite family tradition, Friday Make-Your-Own-Pizza and Movie Night, on exactly every Friday we have no vitally important engagement on the calendar.
That leaves Saturdays primarily for family fun (minus Saturday cleaning chores, which are now fully delegated and assigned to the four humans in the house who create the majority of the mess) at soccer games and cross country meets and playing board games and reading books and generally wrestling wildly enough to incite at least three good weekend fights among brothers. And also driving our people to all the places to see all the people they now love to see.
Sundays are spent with the church family we love and on coveted Daddy-boy dates at parks for Superheroes 3 and 4 while Superhero 1 teaches trumpet lessons and Superhero 2 and I spend the afternoon with the Odyssey team we adore. Sunday nights are youth group, where we drop this only-six-more-months-until-the-15-year-old-can-drive-his-own-booty-to-all-the-ever-loving-places teen before Super-Spouse and I take it upon ourselves to hold our second running date of the week. Because our post-military-retirement goal is to run three half marathons together a year, No. 3 is in November and because we have two babysitters in the house now, and for the love of all things holy, we have paid our dating dues.
Except for my totally-selfish-but-sanity-giving daily morning run, which I’ve only been able to prioritize because this 10-minute-miler is deathly afraid of being the weakest link in our upcoming international mission trip, that’s literally been my while-kids-are-at-school life. I have a shelf of unread books I promised myself I’d finish this fall and 50 book and blog ideas just sitting in a Word Doc, staring back at me unwritten. Though my kids are all in school, I somehow can’t find the hour it takes to blow dry this hair and put on clothes that don’t include elastic or the name of my kids’ schools, and even waking up every day at 4 a.m. to clear my text and email box and spend some crucial time with Jesus and his magical gift of coffee has not ensured that I have writing margin by the end of any given day.
Which means I am now fully embracing my role as the blogger who rarely blogs (but promises to try a few times a year).
And y’all, I feel like I might just be living my best life.
My college bestie and I hold Bible study during lunch hour on Thursdays (and by Bible study, I mean we started out reading the Bible and now just label it “Bible study” in our calendars to feel good about ourselves but instead Facetime to talk about Jesus and life). We were chatting last Thursday about the expectations of our culture on parents and how it’s just not possible to do it all. Something’s gotta give — the meals, the marriage, the home maintenance; the health, the hygiene, the hobbies; the career, the kids’ activities, the compadres; the sleep, the superheroes, the strict schedule; the job, the time with Jesus, an entire family’s JOY, and the list goes on and on. It’s simply not possible to prioritize all.the.things. There are not enough hours in a given day.
What I’ve learned as I’ve more-quickly-than-I-imagined approached 40 is that the things and people that are most important to me have to have significant space on my calendar or they won’t have significant space in my life. I can’t be the superstar at work and the superstar at home and also have 40 Bento boxes full of organic, pre-cut veggies while dating my husband, being fully present and fully available to disciple my kids while simultaneously being Volunteer of the Year in every blessed club and organization at the school and looking like a supermodel while getting enough sleep to look anything like Jesus. (I also can’t be a superstar anyway, because I’m a sinner saved by grace in desperate and dire need of Jesus!)
The truth is, I usually can’t look good to the PTO, the internet and the real-live humans in my home all at the same time.
Something’s gotta give.
And although I have failed repeatedly at this in the past, in this season, I refuse for that to be my family. (Family, thanks for your grace here, because we all know next week I will have overcommitted us to 15 more things and we will have to hold another come-to-Jesus Mama intervention. Love you and thanks.)
So it’s been the blog. And a slew of volunteer opportunities I normally participate in but instead prayerfully turned down this year. And freelancing. And anything that might feel good and outwardly validate my existence as a professional, functioning adult contributing to greater society when the people Jesus has clearly called this girl specifically to in this season are THE PEOPLE RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.
My family.
My friends.
My kids’ friends.
The community where we live.
Seventh graders, learn this lesson long before this nearly 40-year-old did. Saying yes to one thing always means saying no to something else. Don’t let that “no” be to the most beautiful people right in front of you.
Your BEST yes is to the people and things Jesus has for YOU — not for every other person in your life. And it’s okay if those things change from season to season!
If that’s school or job or work or play or parenting or babysitting or volunteering or human cheering, YOU OWN IT!
That might mean at the end of a week, all you’ve done is clean and cook and run humans from place to place and simultaneously hold a million conversations that you will treasure forever. At the end of the day, people are way more important than productivity, and if that’s your life, you slay it, friend. Shine bright. The hurting high schooler in your van is just as important as the reader of your blog, the employer at your work, the principal at your school or the person tallying good deeds and handing out nice human awards. Every single person you encounter is an image bearer of God in need of your light and love and shininess. Whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord, wherever you may be, as insignificant as you may feel the task. And God will use you right there, wherever you are.
Just lavishly love the person right in front of you.
It’s not flashy. It’s not glamorous. It won’t give you a title or an award, and no one else in your life will probably even know about the ways you serve behind the scenes. No one may ever even say thank you for spending 25 percent of your adult life in a discount grocery store in order to love them in their language.
But at the end of the day, it may be your presence, not your blog posts, that makes the most long-lasting difference in this desperately-in-need-of-love world.
Fight for it fiercely.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters …”
~ Colossians 3:23