The Interruptions ARE My Work

Ginny reminded me of something that I learned as a young mother when she quoted C.S. Lewis on her blog:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's own or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day.
C. S. Lewis

It is easy to get caught up in my day to day tasks of housecleaning and other projects and to treat the interruptions of my children as pesky annoyances to get through as quickly as possible so that I can return to the real business of life. But the interruptions ARE my work.

How many women have abandoned the homefront to fulfill themselves or to do "real" work and thereby have missed out on the opportunity to build into their children's lives through quantity time?

How many times have we regarded the needs or wants of a spouse as bothersome when we had made plans to do other things?

The quality of our lives is determined, not by how we operate when things are going smoothly for us, but by how much of God's grace is evident in us when things don't go well.