The Opportunity

I have to admit that I have been jealous.

I have been jealous for what the six women at work with swollen bellies filled with babies feel.  I have been jealous because sometimes I don't know if my body can hold a baby, carry a baby for 9 months.  I thought it would have been easier than it is to become a mom and going to work in the face of due dates and birth plans and baby shower invitations has seemed like too much.  I don't want to consider if I deserve to be a mom more than anyone else, because that is what jealousy really equates to: the thought that you deserve what someone else has more than they do.

I do not want to consider the disappointment and avoid any talk of which one of the 6 moms-to-be are going to see her baby boy or girl before I see mine.  They all will.  Mine only exists, I pray, in the heart of God and in my imagination.  I do not want to admit that tears fill my eyes in ways I never thought they would.  This should have been easier.

The problem with thinking you deserve something other than pain is that God never promised a life void of it.  We get so wrapped up in our grandiose ideas about what being human really should be that we forget that we do not shape our own destinies.  We do not necessarily get to define our own journeys, although we have free will to make our own choices.  If we leave life in God's hands, we might have to hurt a little bit, cry a little bit, pray a little more.  And at the end of the day, we realize that the focus should be on helping others - which really does lessen our own pained experiences.  It gets the focus off what we are going through.

I was jealous.

But then, yesterday, I looked into the eyes of two little children whose foster mother no longer wanted to care for them and their parents aren't currently ready to.  They were "tinies", little ones, babies really that had no place else to go but should have.  I played with them and fumed inside.

At first...

I have to admit I was so angry that these beautiful ones had no one to call mommy at bedtime at night but my body couldn't give me beautiful ones to call me mommy at all.  I felt the tears surge below the surface when I considered the ache in my arms and heart as I watched these little ones run and laugh and play with me.  I felt the "mommy ache" in my soul.

And I was jealous of the parents of these children.  The parents that have their own pained journeys...the parents that will not be tucking their children in tonight...the parents that are not able to parent right now for whatever reason.  They could have had these "tinies" at home with them, but instead, I was standing with their foster care worker trying to find a placement for them because yet another foster home could not love them how they deserved to be loved.  I wondered how I could be beneficial in an already flawed system.  What is worse?  For these to be with their parents or to be shuffled around until someone could love them like children should be loved?

The two sides of my jealousy - the desire to be pregnant like the women surrounding me at work and the desire to love children like these - played games with my heart.  And then...as I am wont to do when I feel overwhelmed and sad, I quieted my soul down.  I let go of the feelings of angst and consternation over what I didn't have in that moment.

The truth is I did have something no one else had in that moment.  I had an opportunity to love those babies right in front of me, in a split second of decision-making.  I could love them and laugh with them and chase them around and let them be kids for just a few moments of their lives.  I could be a safe place, a welcome embrace, a smiling face.  I could be what they missed before showing up in my office with their worker.

I could love them like a mommy.  Even if it was just for five minutes.

Four years ago, a little girl that messed my head up with her blue eyes and blond hair called me "Mommy."  I tried to correct her for obvious reasons, and she wisely told me in her 5-year-old rationale: "But you're like a mommy."

And that has stayed with me ever since.

I am like a mommy because I am a mommy to a million children that don't have one.  I can love in milli-seconds "like a mommy" for those little lives that need me.  I won't make the mistake again thinking that because I didn't birth a child that I can't love that child.  That child is a part of me in that moment.  Those eyes and those smiles and those growing minds are part of my life, and I can touch them.  I can love them.

That's what Jesus did.  That's what I can do.  Right here and right now.

God graced me with a moment in time that I could have wasted with my own selfish feelings and desires - as honorable as they may be.  I could have missed the defining moment in a difficult day in the lives of children whom had crossed my path.  I could have complained my way through about having to stay late at work.  I could have missed my opportunity to be "like a mommy" again.

But I decided that living inside grace for the moment is better than being jealous for a lifetime...