Martha Martha!

Winding down the day with a cup of decaf I opened up my silverware drawer in search of the lone teaspoon. I actually have 12 place settings of flatware; twelve dinner & salad forks, twelve knives, twelve soup spoons… but for whatever reason, these past 6 months, my household has been functioning with only one teaspoon.

The lone spoon is of course never in the silverware drawer. It’s usually in the dishwasher. This has never dissuaded me from hopefully looking in the silverware drawer first, however. Like playing a slot machine, I expectantly pull open the drawer hoping that maybe, just maybe I’ll hit the jack pot. And every 100 drawer pulls or so I get lucky, and the lone spoon will be expectantly lying there, looking up at me with a demitasse, melancholy smile. “I once had friends,” it whimpers. Somewhere in my house, there are in fact, eleven teaspoons. Please tell me, they are somewhere!? I mean, where else would they be?

It hadn’t really started gnawing at me until about a week ago, when we closed on the construction loan for our house renovation project. Yes, it’s true, more than a year later, we are going ahead with the second story addition. And while I haven’t packed one iota, the demo crew is coming in a few weeks, and all the piles of stuff that I had long ago given up finding proper places for, have started screaming at me…

“Where-are-THE-SPOONS?!”

The other day I decided to take an earnest stab at finding them. I mean, certainly the smallest search might produce at least one extra spoon, if not two or three. I began by quizzing my 8-year-old son, a.k.a. “Boy Scientist” who is always concocting various potions, mixtures and solutions in his bedroom.

“Jack? Honey, when you mix up your experiments, what are you doing with the spoons?”

“I dunno mom, I can’t remember.”

“Well, can you think hard, because mommy seems to be missing about eleven of them.”

“Well, umm, I guess I put them in the sink.”

“Are you sure? I mean, because if you put them in the sink, they might have found their way into the dishwasher. Right?”

“I dunno mom, I think that I put the spoons in the sink.”

The next day I began rifling through the many collections & piles in Jack’s room. It had been I while since I had last excavated my way into his room. Aside from the containers of mystery liquids, there were rock piles, stick piles, piles of shredded paper with cryptic Pokémon scenes scrawled on them, paper airplane piles, dismembered captain underpants books, misc. metal objects dug up from the back yard, soccer trophies beheaded by his younger brother, torsos and limbs from various action figures…but nary a single teaspoon.

I was vexed, to say the least. When did the number of spoons in my drawer elude me? Certainly I might have taken note of a 6 spoon deficit? I can’t remember even having two. But there it is. Eleven spoons gone. They are not in the couch or the mini-van or in my yarn stash. They are not in the Lego piles or the Hot wheels baskets. They are not under my bed or in the sand box or shoved down the HVAC vents.

The only thing I can hardly allow myself to believe, is that perhaps, perhaps my independent five year old; who likes to help himself to yogurts and do everything himself, and can’t quite reach the sink yet, has thrown away the spoons with his yogurt cups... all eleven of them? No, I just can’t accept it…

“Sporty-fit-and forty” is now only 35 days away! I may not be as sporty and fit as I hoped for, but I will certainly be forty. Where my thirties went, I can’t recall, but I bet my children could tell me.

The boys, now 8 & 5, drive me crazy, and somehow love me to death. We do need a bigger house. Jack, who must now weigh 80+lbs still jumps and flaps at any exciting thought; and when both boys start tearing through the house it sounds like a pack of charging elephants. They remain completely sweet, however. This was the dialogue in the car yesterday morning--

“Hey Jack, when we grow up, will we still be friends?”

“Yeah Joey we’ll be friends. We’ll just be grown-ups.”

“Yeah and the second best thing about being a grownup is that you get your own house.”

“Well Joe, first we go to college,”

“Yeah, that’s right, college!”

“and then, we find ourselves some wives.”

“Are wives girls?”

“Yeah, girls, that we, you know, that we love. And then they have babies.”

“Yeah, and then the girls are mommies, and we’re daddies.”

“Yeah Joe, then we’re parents, and then our kids grow up and they have kids.”

“What!? No they don’t!”

“Yes Joe! That’s what happens when you get married, you have kids, then they have kids, and then we’re grandpa’s, and then…we DIE!”

At which point, both boys erupted in hysterical laughter. Obviously, the angst of their mortality hasn't come to fruition.

"Boys, you know that you won't really die."

"I know mom, we'll go to heaven. And that's where we'll have the biggest family and the biggest house!" 

How did my eight year old get to be so wise? Yes, the home front is on the move, and I’ve barely been able to stop and take note of it. My “part-time” job working for the church has become an all consuming way of life. Not that I feel like I’ve lost anything. I will cautiously say that I’m beginning to understand Christ’s words, “he who loses his life, finds it,” as piece by piece, the spoons of self service are being displaced. I’m not sure my life could be fuller. Ministry can be a wrecking ball, of sorts.  By God’s grace, I may live to praise Him for it.