Mr. Clean to the rescue!

With a 3-year-old daughter who loves to color every day, and a 1-year-old son who wants to imitate but has yet to master the concept of not eating crayons or using my walls as a canvas, I’m bound to wind up with some crayon marks on the wall.
I am quite certain the little stress of coloring on the walls would be, in my world, a much more magnified disaster if not for one tiny miracle product. Moms, if you haven’t yet discovered this modern marvel, I have the blessing of four small words for you: Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
Now, granted, there are much more powerful things in this world than Mr. Clean Magic Eraser pads to offer a path toward salvation. Take baptism, for example. But, similar to baptism, they sure appear to contain the regenerative power to wash away sins! No longer do I have to feel my blood pressure rise with despair as I watch my son happily defacing the walls, chairs and other furniture with his small wax weapon of choice. I can simply hand him a piece of paper to redirect his artistic efforts and sigh with relief. Yes, it really is that simple. The cleansing pads don’t look like much at first glance. Initially, you think, “Yeah, right! How is this feather-weight marshmallow square going to remove something an SOS pad couldn’t put a dent in?” Then viola! Right before your eyes, you witness the only product containing the word “magic” that astonishingly seems to live up to it’s title. Crayon marks, coffee stains, mysterious black scuff marks that until now no amount of elbow grease could uncover, is effortlessly disappearing with minimum effort. No, I’m not selling them. If I were, I’d be faring much better in these economic times than we are with my being a stay-at-home mom. It is just an amazing phenomenon. How do they work? I may never fully understand. Then again, there are a lot of things on the grander scale of faith that are even more unbelievable, mysterious and marvelous. And, while Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is not an actual requirement for spiritual sanity or salvation; some days, when life as a stay-at-home mom is filled with continuously scrubbing the walls of peanut butter, diaper cream, and Crayola murals, it feels like the little miracles can make a big difference.

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"It's Groundhog Day!"

Laundry, dishes, diapers, meals, toys, vacuum, dishes, laundry, diapers, toys, meals, diapers, vacuum… life as a stay-at-home mom can often resemble the feeling captured in Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. “I’m reliving the same day over and over,” stated by Bill’s character Phil Conners, a weatherman stuck in a time loop on February 2, could be the mantra of many moms, especially during the last six weeks of winter.
Faced with his gloomy forecast, Murray’s character starts out extremely pessimistic and bleakly hopeless, but as the movie progresses, he slowly starts to learn the valuable lesson that true change can only come from within.
The truth is, that while God gives us the freedom of will and choice, the truly important outcomes, if we search within ourselves and trust in Him, are in His hands, in His time. That is why, similar to Groundhog Day, we cannot control the actions of anyone but ourselves. We can shape, influence, discipline, advise and teach, but it is up to our children whether they will heed the lessons and apply them. You can tell your toddler not to hit, your preschooler to say please, your teenager to just say no to drugs, but in the end, the decision for their actions is ultimately theirs. The better we know our children, the less we will worry about the choices they will make. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”- Proverbs 22:6
Zoom out on the bigger picture, and our Father, who knows our souls better than we know ourselves, is parenting us all the same. Some things He knows we have to learn for ourselves, other things He will show to us. Also, akin to the plot of Groundhog Day, there are even times He puts our own metaphorical blizzards in place, as a roadblock around our situations, to keep us right where we are until we get it right.
However relatable the funny repetition in the movie Groundhog Day can be, Conners is a man with no future, which is impossible to experience while raising human beings. God has tomorrows in store for us, even when it may feel as though there wasn’t one today.
“’For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’" –Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)
On days when you feel like Phil Conners felt when he said, “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life,” just remember God promises rainbows after the rain, and spring following each winter. Just as Conners discovers at the end of the movie, “Today is tomorrow. It happened.”

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