Something I hear quite often, along with "are they all yours?" and "boy, you have your hands full!" is, "how do you have time to write with five kids?".
The truth is? I don't.
There are so many other things and people in constant need of my attention.
The reality is, the sink keeps filling with dishes because, for some reason, we have to feed all these little people multiple times a day. The nerve, I tell you...
The laundry pile in the basement rivals Mount Everest, because SEVEN people, many of whom don't seem to know how to distinguish clean clothes from dirty, much to my chagrin.
The Destructive Duo, as I like to call them, wreak havoc on our house all day. The baby pulls every single item out of every cupboard and drawer within his reach and the dog follows him around and chews it all up.
And that's just the start. Then there's schoolwork and appointments and sweeping and organizing and....
There's always something to do. It never gets "done."
But I think we miss that fact, or at least try to convince ourselves completion and perfection is possible. That maybe we're not the messy, broken people we fear ourselves to be if our floors are swept and our belongings are tidy.
I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that no sooner have I swept the floor than someone topples a box of cereal off the table, and it needs swept all over again. If I had the living room floor clean just yesterday, I guarantee you it wouldn't still be spotless today. And though the turnover rate is significantly higher in our house than most, it still happens. Cleaning is futile.
It is necessary to a degree so we don't die of the plague or routinely smell like elephants, but it shouldn't take precedence over all else, at least in my opinion. Cleanliness isn't next to godliness. Creativity is. {Go ahead and Pin that one.}
So while I don't have time to create, I make room to create because it renews my soul. It plucks me out of the drudgery of the mundane just long enough to remind me of a greater good and purpose, of why I toil in the trenches in the first place. While life often inspires me to create, creating inspires me to live. {Pin that one, too. I'm on a roll.}
To create requires sacrifice. Something has to give. When I spend a decent chunk of time writing, I often find my house to look like this afterward:
Evidence of creation. This photo was taken the day I wrote The Ability to Speak the Truth in Love is Not a Right but a Privilege that Must Be Earned, which turned out to be one of the most read/shared essays I've written to date.
Contrary to popular belief, I can't do it all....and neither can you.
When I'm excelling and producing in one area, naturally other areas are going to suffer. So when you see me preaching sermons or writing lengthy blog posts or some other creative endeavor, know that my house looks like a bomb of toys/garbage/snacks exploded inside, and I probably dug whatever I'm wearing out of several unfolded laundry baskets. Or maybe I've just had the same shirt on all week, because changing, like cleaning, is often overrated.
Make room for the things that breathe life into your soul today, friends, whatever those may be. It's a worthy sacrifice. And as always, when we sacrifice the temporary for the eternal, there we find Life that is truly life-giving.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. {C. S. Lewis}