What I Learned Walking in the Rain With a Five-Year-Old

I crawled out of bed yesterday morning and started writing about compassion. Not because I've had a recent meaningful experience with such, but mostly because I've noticed a lack of compassion in the Facebook posts and news headlines lately and it's really starting to annoy me that people can criticize each other from such a disconnected standpoint. A few hours into the day, as I moved from writing to parenting and schooling but kept mulling the post, what I noticed is that being annoyed is incredibly taxing.  By the time we left the house at 9 a.m., I was wiped out. I kept coming back to the post throughout the day, but each time it just made me tired. It had also been raining for two days, so my kids were just running in circles around our downstairs at this point. They kept running past the computer where I was working, sometimes wielding swords, sometimes yelling, "Let's get him!" (Get who?), and occasionally stopping to recount in torturous detail various scenes from their current favorite cartoons. By late afternoon I had kissed inspiration good-bye, and I was reading a book instead when Liam's eyes appeared above the pages. 

"Let's go for a walk," he suggested.

"It's raining."

"Yeah, it is." Something about the way his eyes twinkled made me get up and find my rain boots. I encouraged him to wear his, but he declined, so as he pulled on his sneakers I dug out our rain jackets. Five minutes later we were slogging down the street, him licking the water from his arms and me telling him to stay out of the puddles. 

On the other side of our neighborhood there's a house with a stone cat statue displayed prominently in a front flower bed. My kids have aptly named it The Stone Kitty House, and they beg to walk to it any time we set foot out the front door. It also has brilliant decorations at Halloween, so all in all we spend quite a bit of time in front of this house. The people who live there are very kind and accommodating about our weird fascination with their yard decor. So when I asked Liam how far he'd like to walk, he didn't hesitate. And off we went. 

I heard Glennon Melton speak at a conference last week, and she said the most sacred invitations in life are the people right in front of us. I've been turning that over in my mind ever since. Since I'd already said yes to a walk, yes to being soggy and shivering, yes to a head cold the next morning, and yes to our neighbors peering out their windows like we had lobsters coming out our ears, I thought as an experiment I would say yes to as much as I could while we were on our walk. (I didn't tell Liam my plan, of course. For the love, never hatch this plan and then let your child in on it.)  We plodded down the street toward the cat statue, and Liam stopped talking about television and started recounting all the other adventures we've had just walking around our neighborhood.

It was a lot of fun at first. When he shoved his hood off his head and shook out his hair, so did I. When he proposed we hide like ninjas from the oncoming cars, I was the first to leap toward the bushes. When he slyly suggested that it would be a LOT of fun if we could just jump in a few puddles together--I responsibly pointed out that no way would his one pair of sneakers have time to dry out before school tomorrow. Then we jumped. Before I knew it, we were standing side by side gazing at the stone kitty. 

"Let's keep going," Liam said, and I noted the confidence in his voice. "There's a razorback statue up the street."

Sure! We were losing light in a hurry, and the two sensible members of our household were likely back at home wondering where we were. I hesitated. I didn't know what exactly to pray in that moment, so I just sent some vibes toward God, hoping He would deliver them to my husband, and we continued on our way. At the end of the street, I turned to Liam once again for direction.

"Whichever way you want, Mom," was his reply this time. 

"Well." I pointed to the right. "That way is home."  Then left. "That way isn't." 

He grinned and skipped off in the exact direction you know he took. I sighed. Aside from my feet, I was really wet. My nose was numb so I couldn't tell if snot was running down my face. I was feeling pretty sure this whole 'Yes' thing was for suckers, and I was about to shout to Liam that we needed to turn around, when at that moment an orange cat ran down a driveway toward us. More accurately, it ran toward Liam. There is something about this boy and animals. He loves them--every animal, regardless of size, shape, smell, or national origin. And they know this about him on an instinctive level I don't understand. Maybe he emits some kind of natural scent of kindness and sincerity and gentleness that is stronger than all the boy odors. So this kid, he approaches people with utmost suspicion and self-consciousness, but with animals he possesses an extraordinary insight into how they need to be handled, and he becomes totally comfortable. This is true whether he's relocating a ladybug to our garden or feeding ostriches out a car window at the safari park. Observing him with animals is like watching someone walk into his own skin over and over again. It transfixes me, because I'm 32 and still don't know how to be that comfortable with myself. So I stood back and watched as he squatted down to greet this cat, and this time I knew exactly what to pray. Because rabies.

It turns out I didn't need to worry. Liam can probably smell rabies, anyway. After obligingly sniffing the palm he held out for inspection, the cat proceeded to wind itself around and around his legs, pressing its head into his chin and smacking him lovingly with its tail. I could hear it purring from ten feet away. At one point the cat trotted over to me, sniffed, and allowed a quick head scratch before bolting back to Liam and continuing its love poem to a boy. It appeared to be trying to push every inch of fur into his hands at once. And he was just laughing the whole time. I think he forgot where he was for a minute, because finally he stood up, blinked, and said, "Oh. It's dark."

So we headed home, half-jogging and splashing and talking about the cat. It followed us for a few houses before sitting down. It raised a paw, licked it, and then gave the paw a little flick before turning back toward its own home. I am not making that up. I looked at Liam, shocked, and said, "Did you see that?!"

"Sure," he shrugged. "She was just saying good-bye. C'mon. Let's run." So we did, all the way home. It was a good mile and I almost died, by the way. 

I don't write about my kids much these days. Partly it's because I think stories about them belong to them, and I walk a fine line along a boundary I don't want to overstep. But also I kind of struggle against the idea that simply raising a family can be full of magic. It feels self-indulgent somehow, me embracing my typical family and our typical days, like God wouldn't approve of me humoring my kid on a whim when there are hungry people on the streets and terrified kids who need a safe bed. Like I don't have anything to learn from what's right in front of me right now, because somehow it doesn't feel like God's work. I'm not saying we should all stick our heads in a hole and block out the world's problems, but I tend to forget there were plenty of times when Jesus seemed to quit taking himself seriously and focused instead on making a really great moment. He accepted invitations as they appeared, and he encouraged his friends to do the same. His big focal point on the horizon was dying on a cross, for goodness' sake, but at one point he joked with a lady about eating crumbs under a table. Even with the grim and quite important task laid out before him, he didn't forget the power of whimsy. He understood that one moment has the power to build confidence and character in supernatural ways. I've been grumpy lately, annoyed with my kids and treating them like a hindrance to some great thing I could be doing, and it's become exhausting. I think maybe I've been treating them like our everyday stuff isn't worth God's time--like He can't do anything with a walk in the rain. Like whimsy is something I need to teach out of them so we can get to the serious business of being productive Christians. But I remember now--there's so much we can learn from each other when we say yes to something silly together. Sometimes the little moments are where we lose ourselves to what we love, and what a pleasure this must be to our God who created us for that very purpose--to love. I hope next time Liam at least has the sense to wear his rain boots. But if not, I'll probably go ahead and walk with him anyway.