Checkers

This afternoon Sis and Mister asked me to help them unearth the checkerboard from the pile of treasures in the closet. We found the board sans checkers but they were not to be deterred. I pretended not to notice as they hunted through the playroom looking for suitable substitutes. In the end wooden pizza toppings with Velcro bottoms faced off with dollar store variety safari animals. Pepperoni was no match for the king of the jungle and in the end the ferocious beasts ate all the toppings. Everyone seems to have a good time.

Improvisation. An easy task for the agile and imaginative mind of a preschooler. Child’s play, really. But also a worthy weapon to wield in the daily humdrum of adulthood. I have oft clutched tightly to my breast the biblical command to shrug off the incessant tapping of the formidable foe, Worry, looking to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field that do not toil or spin. I remember that it says that Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as these. That my Heavenly Father knows what I need and has provided for both necessity and beauty in the bounty of his blessings.

The preschoolers remind that one of my provisions is the ability to work with what I have. To look for the blessings where I absent-mindedly left them under rocks or sweaty gym clothes. To bring in the ones that have been damaged by rain and set them to dry under a thick stack of books. To look again in the closet. To mend and make amends.

The baby has been carefully and patiently pulling the stuffing from a significant rip in the leather of my favorite chair. Some of it she eats and the rest she leaves in a pile on the floor as evidence that I am a neglectful mother without the skill or means to repair a family heirloom. So, with visions of tigers, lions, mushrooms and cheese, I wrapper the worn corner in painter’s tape until later. Probably much later. But I am unwilling to part with the baby. Or the chair, which falls somewhere on the continuum between need and want, but well within the boundaries of grace and invention.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or what you will wear. Is not life more important that food, and the body more important than clothes?” Matthew 6:25