Perspective.

Perspective.  Hardest.  Concept.  Ever.  And in every facet of life.  For example, if you've ever found yourself in the middle of an argument over breastfeeding...ARG!  Where is the perspective...that each child is different and each family is different.  All of my kids were breast and/or bottle fed for different periods of time and in different capacities.  When Blake comes home from school with his folder signed because he spent the afternoon in kindergarten falling out of his chair on purpose (God bless Mrs. Hall), it has never once entered my mind that maybe I should have given him less formula and more breast milk.  And when Parker throws himself on the ground and scrunches up his face because I will not let him hold the open container of pudding and walk around with it, I also never think, this is because I should have weaned him sooner.  While feeding your infant seems so consuming at the time, especially to first time moms, the fact is it passes so quickly and then you're on to the next challenge.  Like keeping your children from walking naked in front of open windows.

I recently read through Ecclesiastes, which is an interesting chapter.  It starts with these words, "Meaningless, meaningless! Everything is meaningless!"  Reason #257 why context is important particularly when quoting scripture.  :)  The overall theme of Ecclesiastes is that the things of earth have no permanent value.  We can acquire all sorts of wisdom, riches and experience, but we can't take them with us.  Even its most popular passage..."There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven" (no Pete Seeger didn't come up with that on his own)...speaks more about the cycle of toil in life than everything-in-its own-time message we like to attach to it. 

But there is hope for all of us in the cycle, when we line ourselves up with the right perspective.

"What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live.  That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil--this is the gift of God.  I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.  God does it so that men will revere him."  Ecc. 3:9-14

Life has the tendency to get a little mundane from time to time, so I guess we feel like we have to jazz it up a bit.  You know, making a bigger deal of where the coats should be hung up than probably needs to be made.  Or breastfeeding.  (Again, ARG.)  But when we keep the perspective of grace before us I think we are afforded the ability to see things in the beauty that God created them in.  Surely, we cannot take it all with us.  No earthly works--no toil, no wisdom, no riches--can give us what faith does.  There is nothing about my life that will endure without the grace of God.  And that, my friends, is perspective.

XOXO...Kelly