You’ve Got Your Hands Full!

I saw a post on Facebook recently with a cute picture of two babies wearing vests with the slogans “Buy One” on one and “Get One Free” on the other.  Adorable.  Then I looked through the comments and found a stream of mums of twins complaining about the things people say to them.  One, which seemed to come up again and again, was people saying “You’ve got your hands full there” or “They’ll keep you on your toes”.  The general response to this was “Do they think I don’t know how hard my life is?!”  Well, as someone who has been guilty of spouting such trite comments to someone I don’t know, I can assure you that I’m not telling you something I think you don’t already know.  I say it because I’m reaching out.  I want to say that I can see how your life can be challenging at times.  I know that I can’t change or ever fully understand the days when you find yourself wondering how much they will sell for on ebay, but I want to say, in my clumsy. possibly ill thought out way, that I care.  

But that’s the crux of it.  We’re not good at accepting that people simply care.  We look for the condemnation and the accusation rather than accepting the love.  We’re having some work done at home at the moment.  This work has resulted in a rather ugly skip on the front lawn.  A couple of days ago I saw my neighbour walk past our house.  He looked at our garden as he passed.  Then he stopped.  He turned around and retraced a few steps before bending down, picking some rubbish up off the lawn and putting it into the skip.  My first thought was “Good grief!  He must think we’re making the street look like a mess”.  I wondered how many others in the street were concerned about their property prices and wondering how long our garden would be looking like Steptoe’s yard.  Then I realised that my lovely neighbour was simply helping.  He’d spotted something that needed doing for us and he’d done it.  There wasn’t any judgement involved.  Just an act of kindness.  Just love that I could ignore, misunderstand or choose to gratefully accept.  

Every day, if we look, we can see people offering small parts of themselves.  A smile.  Helping to reach something in a supermarket, Moving out of your way when you’re coming through with a double buggy.  A word on a Facebook thread.  The list goes on.  And so many of these things can be ignored or misunderstood.  As we travel through Holy Week I am going to challenge myself to see where people are reaching out in love.  I’ve had enough of missing when people are giving me their heart through a kind word, a helpful gesture … or a walk to Golgotha.  Who’s with me?