Smoothing out a quiet edge

Noise.  Inescapable, encroaching noise that demands attention and turns our focus to the rough world around us.  The diesel engine revving in the street, the stereo blaring in the car next to me in traffic, the lady on her cell phone in the grocery store regaling her fellow shoppers with a one-sided conversation that only makes sense to her--these are more than mere distractions.  They hijack our thoughts and threaten to steal our peace, if we let them.

It's in the margins of my life that I find rest.  The few minutes in the car when I turn off the radio and mute the cell phone.  The spare minutes at night when my family sleeps and I am awake, alone with my thoughts.  These cherished moments bring clarity to what has gone on before and focus to what is to come.  Without them, I become muddled and direction-less.  And in my hurry to organize my day within a minute of its life, I lose the quiet edges and lose myself in the process.

And if I know that I need those white spaces, how much more do my children?  How much more do they need time to distill the flow of happenings and thoughts and emotions that come from a young person finding out who they are and who they want to be? Time to pray, time to think, time to listen to nothing and hear everything that your soul wants to say to you.

As a mother, I help my children weave together the fabric of their being.  Love and faith and hope and all the beautiful things they are learning and experiencing as they grow, come together in a tapestry.  And as our lives become busier and faster and full to overflowing, that tapestry gets bunched and wrinkled until it becomes hard to almost impossible to weave the things that matter together.  But as we find a little room, a little space, we can begin to press the wrinkles and smooth out a quiet edge to our life so that we can see the whole and not just the bits.  And the pattern, unfolded and unwrinkled, becomes visible to our hearts and the path forward becomes just a little bit clearer.