Yesterday was an unusually beautiful day for April in the Pacific Northwest (most often, it’s still deciding whether it wants to move on from Winter). So, for the first time in a few gloomy months, I finally got my littles outdoors to play.
I’ve been working hard for a couple of years to get our backyard play-ready. When we first moved in, our backyard was covered in mulch. You know, the evil little shreds of wood that are just looking for ways to get stuck in your clothes and your skin. I’ve done a pretty good job creating some playable areas, but yesterday I found out that my great adversary is still hunting me, and my children.
I noticed that my one-year-old had a 1/8-inch-thick splinter lodged under his thumbnail. Although he clearly didn’t want us to even touch his right hand, this sucker had to come out. The thirty minutes of struggle and tears and wailing provided some insight into a process we may experience with our own Heavenly Father.
We all have splinters. Maybe it’s an addiction. Maybe it’s a fear, or something that is part of our identity that we can’t let go of. It could be any number of idols. Maybe a traumatic experience or unforgiveness. We all walk around with these invisible things, causing us pain, that we may or may not be aware of. Like my baby, we may be aware that we are in pain in that general vicinity, but we don’t know why. We don’t realize that our deep sense of dissatisfaction or discouragement is being caused by something we are allowing to stay lodged in our lives.
Our loving, all-knowing Father has infinitely more experience and perspective—so, of course, He sees it. He draws us near, ready to extract the splinter to begin healing the wound—but we thrash around wildly and withdraw.
No! It hurts! Don’t touch it!
We would rather go back to playing with our toy cars and pretending that the splinter doesn’t exist. It’s easier to try to ignore the dull pain than to go through the more excruciating process of addressing it. Even though, as our Father is fully aware of, the process is necessary if we don’t want the wound to get infected and worsen. Some infections, when left untreated, can even threaten our lives.
It will just take a short period of more intense pain to work through it, to begin the work of healing. If we knew how minuscule the painful period would be, in comparison to the greater span of our lives, and how great the relief of being pain-free, we may fully give ourselves over to the good, good Father who is waiting with open arms and tweezers at the ready.
My splinter—or one of them God is currently making me aware of—is escapism through books. (How weird this must be, for a writer to admit her idolatry of stories.) It may sound laughable, but when you spend all day with your kids just waiting for the moment they fall asleep, so you can finally get back to finding out what Katniss Everdeen is up to . . . it feels not only a little pathetic, but heartbreaking to think I am longing for something pretend when, right in front of me, I have real-life little people who are begging for new discoveries of their own.
This obsession with me-time, the self-centered need for downtime—that I insist must be in the form of reading a novel—is a thief of presentness with my children. Yes, it may be wise to take time to recharge, but after my Father has pulled the splinter of idolatry from my finger, I am certain that I will find that leaning into Him provides more abundant and lasting restoration than any time spent straining to find out which tribute is killed off next before the wake-up clock turns green.
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Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash
Thank you for your gift of writing! This was wonderful and well-timed!😊