{five-minute-friday}

A collaboration of writers. A collage of pieces focused on one weekly prompt. A five-minute challenge to write raw and exposed. Completely unedited. Magnificently honest.

This Week’s Prompt:  Season

“It’s just a season.”

We say it after a sleepless night, endless wake ups and feedings.

We say it when they refuse the broccoli. The tomatoes. The chicken.

We say it when “Mine!” dominates their vocabulary.

But what we fail so often to realize is that those rough seasons are a part of a bigger picture. A bigger season. A season of age. Of days, weeks, months, years.

And those hard parts of the seasons are still the fabric that makes up this time.

And this time will be over.

So much of it is already behind us.

The nativity snow globe sits on the shelf, and stockings are hung. Stress tugged at my shoulders as I pounded in the tiny wall nails and hung the garland. My two-year-old refused to be anywhere but on my hip. And I just wanted to get the house decorated. I rushed through it. And rush always steals.

But then, when the baby woke, this seven-month-old ginger headed boy, he looked up, and there I saw it. The reflection of gleaming Christmas lights in his eyes. He stared, mesmerized, and I realized it.

This is his first Christmas.

A new season.

A season of beauty and wonder and discovery and magic and Jesus. All new.

It will come and go, this season. But right now, while we have it, I’ll clutch tightly to it with all I have. Because it’s his first. So it’s a first for me, too.