Enough

It is an ordinary week at the Jones house, which is to say it is a full one — and this time the story belongs to the one who holds it all together. The dishwasher quits on a Monday. The to-do list grows back overnight like grass. And Mom, moving through it the way she always does, catches herself living a little way out ahead of her own life: once this is finished, then I’ll rest; once things settle, then it will be good. But the settling never quite comes. It takes a dropped plate, a devotion turned around on her for once, and four plain words from her youngest girl to help Mom see the thing she is always telling everybody else — that thanks is not something you save for when everything is finished, and that what she has, unfinished and ordinary and loud, was already more than enough. Scripture: Philippians 4:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (KJV).

www.pathstoglory.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home, and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, Mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close. Papa has a story for you about your favorite family, the Joneses. Every now and then, it's worth stopping to look at the one who is always holding the whole thing together and asking how she is doing under the load. Her name, by the way, is Rebecca. It's worth saying out loud because a mother can go a long stretch of years being nobody's Rebecca and everybody's mom, and half forget she was ever the first thing at all. Keep that in your pocket. It matters later.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

The honest answer that particular week was tired. It started on Monday when the dishwasher quit.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Not with a bang. It just went quiet in the middle of a load, half its work done, and sat there full of soapy water like it had decided it had earned a rest, which was more than Mom felt she was allowed to decide. So the dishes went back to being done by hand at the sink, which added a good forty minutes to every day of a week that did not have forty spare minutes anywhere in it. And the week went on the way those weeks do. Somebody needed a poster board at eight o'clock at night. The expedition made a sound again. Anna lost the same shoes twice. There was a school thing and a church thing and a thing at the church about the school thing. The laundry which Mom was fairly sure she had finished on Tuesday was somehow taller on Wednesday than it had been before she'd started. Through all of it, Mom kept moving, calm, on the top, the way water is calm on the top. And she kept telling herself the things she always told herself. Once I get through this week, once the dishwasher's fixed, once things settle down, then I'll catch my breath, then it'll be good. She had been saying the same version of that if she was honest for about eleven years. Here is the thing about Mom that the children never knew without ever being told. She was the one who noticed. She noticed when Alison's shoulders climbed up toward her ears. She noticed the day Addison changed her fancy bow for a plain one, she noticed when Anna got quiet, which was how you knew something was truly wrong. She spent her whole day noticing everybody, catching every small thing before it fell. It was a kind of love, all that noticing. It was also, though nobody would ever have dared call it that, a kind of tiredness. Because the person who catches everything never quite gets to set anything down herself. What she did not notice was that she had stopped living in the same week as the rest of them. She was always a little way out ahead of it. While she washed Monday's dishes, she was already solving Thursday. While she sat at supper she was mostly listening for what still needed doing after it. The good part, the part where she would finally rest and finally look around and finally let it all be enough. Well, that part was always up ahead. On the far side of just one more thing. The way the end of a rainbow is always just to end the next field over. Dad saw it before she did. Dad usually did, though he was wise enough not to say so too quickly. He watched his wife move through that week like a woman crossing a river on stones, eyes down hunting the next dry place to put her foot, and never once looking up at the water going by, which was, as it happened, absolutely beautiful. It came apart on Thursday over a plate. Mom was at the sink, of course, hands in the dish water, when one of the good plates slipped, just slipped, you know the way a wet plate slips, and hit the floor and broke cleanly into three pieces. It wasn't a special plate. It wasn't the last of anything. On any other day it would have been nothing at all, a quick sweep and a shrug. But it was Thursday, at the end of the week, and Mom stood looking down at the three pieces of an ordinary plate, and to her very great surprise her eyes filled up and spilled over. She put both wet hands on the edge of the sink and let it come quiet, so the children wouldn't hear. The same quiet crying she would have crossed the whole house to comfort if anybody else was. She was not crying about the plate. She knew that even while it was happening. She was crying about the dishwasher and the laundry that grew in the night, and the eleven years of once things settled down and the slow, quiet fear underneath all of it. That maybe things were never going to settle down. Not really, not ever, and that she was somehow doing the whole thing wrong because she couldn't get to the bottom of the list. Ava Grace was the one who found her there. Ava Grace, who noticed people the way her mother did, came around the corner for a cup of water and stopped and looked up at Mom standing over the broken plate with wet eyes. And didn't run for help, didn't ask what was wrong. She just came and stood against Mom's leg, the way Andy did, and put one small hand flat on Mom's knee, and waited. After a minute, Mom crouched down and wiped her face and tried to make it ordinary. It's okay, baby, she said. Mom's just tired. It'll be good once things get caught up. Once everything's done.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Ava Grace looked at her with those steady eyes and thought about that. You keep saying once, she said. That was all. Four words the way Ava Grace did.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

But Mom, kneeling on her own kitchen floor beside three pieces of a plate, felt the four words go all the way in, the way her own true words sometimes went all the way into the children. You keep saying once. She did. She had a whole life she loved, a good man, five loud, wonderful children, a warm house, a god who had never once let go of her hand, and she had been living the entire thing in a waiting room, out in the whole way of her own life. Certain the good part hadn't started yet because the dishes weren't done. Well, when do you think it gets done? Mom asked her, not really expecting an answer. Ava Gray shrugged, the enormous unbothered shrug of a six year old. It doesn't, she said, as though everybody knew that. That's why you have to like it now, the way it is now. And she got her cup of water and patted off, having rearranged her mother's entire life and gone to look for a snack. Mom stayed on the floor a moment longer beside the three pieces of plate, and laughed once wetly up at the ceiling. She had spent eleven years teaching these children that God is in the middle of things and not at the end of them. And here was the smallest of her girls handing her lesson right back to her with a shrug on her way to the crackers. That night, after the little ones were down, mom told Dad about the plate, and about the four words and about the waiting room. And Dad, who had been watching all week and praying and holding his peace, reached over for the Bible on the nightstand and said, Can I read you something, Rebecca? Not the kids, just you. It struck Maum as he found the place that she almost never was the one being read to. She was the one who made the room quiet so the children could hear. Nobody had turned the lamp toward her in a long time. And nobody had called her Rebecca in longer than that. The sound of her own name in her husband's mouth undid something small and tight in her chest before he had read a single word. Dad read her a man in prison of all people, writing to his friends about being happy. Not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content. Philippians four and eleven. He learned it, Dad said. That's the part I never noticed until lately. He wasn't born content. It wasn't his personality. He learned it the same way you learn anything, by practicing it in a lot of weeks that didn't feel like enough. He turned a few pages, and here's how you practice. In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you Thessalonians five and eighteen. Not for everything, Dad said, in everything. Right in the middle of the broken plate and the busted dishwasher, and the laundry that won't die. You don't wait for the week to get good and then say thanks. You say thanks and it turns out the week was already good. And you'd just been too far out ahead of it to notice. Mom was quiet for a long time. Ava Grace said almost that exact thing in about four words. She gets it from her mother, Dad said. Nothing about the week changed. The dishwasher was still broken, the list was still long, Friday came with its own full arms the way Fridays do. What changed was Mom? Or not even Mom exactly, just where mom was standing. She stopped living out in the hallway. She came back and stood in the actual week she actually had, and she started clumsily at first, to practice the thing the man in prison had learned. She gave thanks at the sink, hands in the dishwasher, for hands that worked and a family that made this many dishes. She gave thanks for the laundry, because the laundry meant there were seven people in this house to wear it. When Anna lost the shoe a third time, Mom laughed instead of sighing, and was mildly astonished to discover that laughing took less out of her than sighing had. It was the same kitchen. It was a completely different woman standing in it. The children noticed the way children notice everything, without having words for it. Alison couldn't have told you what was different, she just found herself lingering in the kitchen more. Addison, who read a room the way other people read a page, noticed her mother's face had come unclinched somewhere around Friday, could not have said why, and drew a small picture of the two of them at the sink that she didn't show anybody and quietly kept. Andy, who was an expert on exactly one thing, which was whether the people he loved were happy, kept toddling up and patting his mom's leg and reporting happy. And this week he was right, and he knew it. On Saturday evening, worn down to the good kind of tired, Mom took a cup of coffee out to the front step just to sit for a minute, which was itself a small act of rebellion against the list. Down the street, Brother Thompson and Sister Beverly were on his porch in the two chairs, the way they were most evenings now, in no hurry at all, still waiting on the Lord's good time to make their season turn, and content you could see it from clear up the street, content right in the middle of the waiting. Mom looked at them a while, and thought that she and Brother Thompson had been trying to learn the very same lesson from two very different ends of it that you can be glad now. That the good part is not stored up at the finish. It is handed to you in pieces all along the way, and the whole trick is opening your hands for it while it's passing. Dad came out and sat down beside her on the step and didn't say anything, and they watched the light go down over the neighborhood together. The dishwasher's still broke, Mom said after a while. I know, Dad said. I'm all right anyway, she said, and to her own surprise, she was. Later, when the children were tucked in and the house had gone quiet in a good way, Mom made one last pass through it. The way she did every night, but she did it a little slower this time, on purpose. She stood in the doorway of the girls' rooms and listened to them breathe. She picked Andy's red ball up off the floor and set it on the shelf. She looked at the sink still holding a few of the day's dishes, and did not feel the old pole to finish them tonight.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

They would be there tomorrow. So would she. That was allowed to be enough. Ava Grace, it turned out, was not quite asleep.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Mom, she said in the dark as Mom passed the door. Are things settled down now? Mom stood in the doorway and thought about how to answer that honestly. No, baby, not even a little. But I've got you. And I've got all of them. And I've got your dad, and I've got the Lord.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

She smiled in the dark. Turns out that he's already enough. And I well I just missed it, honey.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Good, said Ava Grace, satisfied, and was asleep before mom reached the end of the hall. And Papaw, telling it, looked around at his grandchildren gathered close and said that of all the things a person can spend a whole life waiting for, the saddest one is the good part.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Because the good part was never up ahead. It was every ordinary, loud, unfinished day the entire time. Give thanks in it, Papa said. Not after it. Your mother learned that over a broken plate. You can have it for free.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Now, who's ready for brownies?