I had several ideas for a post today.  I was going to write about my daughters and how the way they care for their baby dolls mirrors the image I have given them.  I was going to write about my awful grocery store experience with Amelia opening tic tacs and the WIC cans of beans that wouldn’t scan.  I was going to write about the recipes I’m cooking up for a mom’s coffee break tomorrow.

Instead I’m writing about this.

It rained all morning, grey and drizzly and misty and cold.  Then early in the afternoon, the sun came right on out and shone all warm and golden.  Then it rained again.

Yet the sun was still shining.

The sky out my front storm door was streaked with blues and sunbeams danced through the clouds.  But out back the view from my kitchen sink where I was washing the mixing bowls and scrubbing dried breakfast eggs, the sky was darkly ominous…except the sun was still shining on the trees.

Which got me thinking, isn’t it amazing that even when it’s raining, the sun still lights up my world?  Which then got me thinking about the perceptions I create among everyone in my world.  I’ve had some dark days, days when there was definitely no sunshine coming out of me.  You know those days, those times when nothing is right, nothing is good enough, and everything just seems too hard and unfair.  Days when juice is spilled all over the floor you just mopped, laundry is knocked from its neatly folded stack, dinner burns all over the stovetop, and there’s a note from your daughter’s teacher in her agenda.  Days when you think this is not the life I signed up for, Lord.

But He didn’t promise me sunshine everyday or kids who always obey or an emergency fund in the bank.

Instead He promised to teach me obedience through the example of my children; He promised that He alone would be my emergency fund; He promised that even when the sky turns dark, I’d still be able to find the light.