It's a small, small world

With the recent arrival of my daughter, many things in my world seem to have suddenly shrunk. My life is looking very different. It now revolves around twenty weeny fingers and toes, piles and piles of miniature clothing too cute to be believed, and short, snatched bursts of activity or sleep (it's taken two sittings to complete this post, and guess what - it's shorter than my usual offerings!)

And I believe God is teaching me something kind of big through all this small-ness (of course it's a word - you know what it means don't you?) 

I am someone who tends to measure my worth by my achievements. I can't count the number of wise and helpful spiritual friends who have tried to help me see that I am a human "being" not a human "doing" and that it's ok to sit still sometimes and just "be". That if I can't "do" or if what I "do" doesn't meet expectations, my value does not decrease. I know all of that to be true. It's just that I've never quite managed to apply it to my life.

When I was suffering with depression, I was unable to do what I was used to doing or wanted to do. I was so blessed to find that the people around me in general, and God in particular, didn't reject me, forget about me, or punish me for my lack of achievement. But that didn't change my focus on getting better so I could go back to "doing".

Now what I am "doing" is looking after my baby girl. Some days I don't see anyone except for her and my husband. I find I have little to add to a conversation that doesn't revolve around the wonders of cloth nappies (they do look lovely on my washing line!), cleaning up sick (you get significantly less thorough as time goes on...) or the trials of breastfeeding (this probably isn't the arena for that though, right?) And I am surprisingly unbothered (also a word) by the fact that my contribution to wider society is currently - well - small. That's not the lesson I'm learning, though. 

Here's the lesson:

I can (and absolutely do) sit for hours holding my child or watching her and I am blown away by how amazing she is, how precious, how I would literally do anything for her. And what has she done? Nothing. Nothing anyone would call an achievement, anyway. She sleeps, eats, cries, smiles, poos, coos, cwtches, wriggles and sneezes and yet she is the most utterly priceless thing in the universe.

And maybe so am I.