A trip to Hobby Lobby, an hourglass, and a new perspective…

So, last weekend, I took Olivia to Hobby Lobby so she could  get out of the house for a little bit and take her mind off of Lupus for a minute or two. She saw  this  pretty hourglass on one of the shelves and asked if she could get it.  I put it in the carriage and, honestly, didn’t think about it again until this morning. Let me explain.  I went up to her room to put some laundry away after I took her and Grayson to school.  When I glanced up at her bureau, I saw the top half of the glass filled with sand.  I remembered that Olivia had flipped it before she left for school because the top was empty.  Then, I looked beyond the glass to the beautiful Precious Moments figurines that my sister Lisa buys for all of the children each year on their birthday.  Olivia’s train is long at 13.  I remember opening each one like it was yesterday.  In the midst of my daydream, my eye caught the other bureau in the room…the one with this collage on top of it…

It’s almost as if my entire undergraduate college degree sprang to life and began to mock me. (I majored in English and now the devices of irony, personification, and theme were alive and dancing a jig in my house.) I walked over to Gray’s room and looked on his bureau.  This was staring back at me

See, life is like the hour glass on the bureau.  Every day is a sand crystal. (See what I did there with the metaphor?) But, unlike what Olivia did this morning, we can’t just flip the glass over and start from the beginning and have an endless supply of days to enjoy.  And, the days go by. They go by whether we make the most of them or not. Whether we are happy or not.  They even go by in the midst of our deepest despair and bring us to a new place in time every day.

So, while we can’t simply turn back the clock, we can make the most of every day.  We can actually live in the moment–even the sad, crazy, hectic, stressful ones–because one day, the last sand crystal will fall through the glass.  And, there won’t be a way to turn the glass around.  And, one day, when you are in your daughter’s room, you’ll be struck with the fact that the glass is half full and that isn’t always a good thing.  Kids grow up so fast and one day it is Valentine’s Day and you tell them to stand in the special place to take their annual picture.  They walk to the couch all “teen like” and you look through the lens of the camera.  You see this

But, when you go to upload the pictures, you realize that picture was just sand crystals that have long since passed through the narrow opening.  You know your children are now teenagers and the rituals of Valentine’s Day’s past are no longer current.  They want to get to school or the guitar lesson or the library (ok, wishful thinking on that one).

The moral of the story isn’t to tell you not to shop at Hobby Lobby. 🙂 The moral of my story is that life realizations strike us at the weirdest and most mundane times.  Best to pay attention when they are telling you something or the lesson might just slip through your fingers like the sands in that hour glass.