As anyone who has ever worked or lived with toddlers knows, kids are crazy. I am in the middle of that oh-so-delightful stage where my baby is not a baby anymore and is instead beginning to learn how to be his own person. He has opinions on everything and he makes them known. He is starting to understand and decide what he likes and it changes more often than most people change socks. He is getting more and more curious about the world around him and he is not always willing to wait for me in order to start his exploration. In short, he's loud, messy, adventurous, and occasionally belligerent. He is a TODDLER.
The thing about the toddler phase is that it is physically and mentally exhausting. Everything is constantly moving and changing, and the endless rounds of questions and stories you can't quite decipher can leave you breathless and disoriented. Chaos is the default setting. Parenting a Tiny Tornado of Terror is hard enough as it is, but then add in other kids, a house, a spouse, a career, and anything else you've go going on and you have a perfect recipe for burn out. 2 year olds are hard work.
Yesterday was Epiphany and I kinda forgot about it, because my Littlest was on a tear. Quite literally. Aside from his normal shenanigans of undoing any progress I make in regards to sorting, organizing and cleaning, he also found a few pieces of Styrofoam and proceeded to make his own snow globe out of the living room. I mean, he had help from the big boys, but he definitely started the party. The thing that amuses me about this is that Epiphany is often associated with the visit from the Magi. A visit that would have likely occurred right in the middle of Jesus' own toddlerhood. I can easily picture Mary removing her busy little investigator from the table he was using to get a better view out the window, answering a million questions and cleaning food off the ceiling wondering how on earth it got up there in the first place. Or maybe Mary and Joseph taking turns guiding Jesus away from the animal pens, or quickly grabbing him before he fell into a large water trough while he tried to float his leaf "boat" in it. I don't mean to imply or believe in anyway that toddler Jesus would have been a brat, or that he was intentionally disobedient. He was fully God, as well as fully man, after all. But he also would have been busy learning his world, and finding out what his boundaries were. Toddlers are a lot, even when they're well behaved.
I also believe that the timing of the Magi's visit was not in anyway coincidental. God is a Master of details. He sent the Magi with gifts that would remind Mary of what He had promised her about her child. Gold for His royal lineage, that he would be the King of Kings. Frankincense for his priesthood, the High Priest before God who would intercede on our behalf. Myrrh, for his humanity and mortality, The Prophet who would call us back to God and who's death and resurrection would grant us permanent access to the throne room of Heaven in order to restore our broken relationship with God. Reminders that this present moment was not the whole story. That even though her life might feel overwhelming and mundane, repetitive and downright frustrating, she was playing an important part in a much bigger plan.
It's really easy to get bogged down in the every day busyness of keeping a tiny human alive and generally happy. You can get this kind of tunnel vision, and you forget to step back and look at the big picture. You lose sight of the fact that you are setting the foundation for a whole, grown-up person. And when you lose sight of that, parenting gets harder. You need to be able to see where you're going in order to stay on the correct course. "Where there is no vision, the people perish", and all that. So, just as God sent the Magi to Mary with reminders of the Grand Design and her part in the story, we too are sent friends and family to remind us of who we are, who we are raising and where we are all going together. Parenting is a high and holy calling, so it is incredibly important that we lean into the gifts God has provided us in order to do this job well. And then we have the grace of being this gift for others, reminding them that these hard days lead to big and beautiful things, and they are so very worth it.
What a beautiful Epiphany.
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