AHHH! - It's all perspective

You know when you stay up too late and then your Lola wakes angry, screaming at 6am, waking the 8-yr-old who then lies in your bedroom floor begging for movies and flipping the drawer pull so that you're wide awake with no chance of going back to sleep?  You haven't even gotten out of bed and you feel rage toward your children.  You know?
But then your Lola lies next to you and rubs her pinky on your nose while she sucks her thumb and her hair is all over your face and she smells good.

You're at Sam's and the 4-yr-old never lets go of the neck of your shirt when you're pulling her out of the cart until she's half a mile away from you, and all the world has seen all the way to your belly button.  We're maneuvering the cart and blocking people's way and I'm giving out commands, "On the side, girls."  They're tripping and bumping heads.  It's not huge things.  Just 52 little ones all at once that make me insane.

On the drive home one kid asks a question and you give a nice, detailed answer only for the other kid to hear part of the answer, get very curious, and need you to explain it all again.
First Kid:  "Is that car up there a police car?"
Me: "No, that's a Lexus up there.  It's not a police car because police men don't get Lexuses."
Other kid: "What?  Why?  Where?  How?  What does this mean?"
Me: "It means nothing.  It is so not important.  Do I have to talk about this?"

You spray and squirt soap all over the bathroom and totally forget to scrub it because you took 4 steps and found 32 other things to do and the soap in the bathroom dried.

My Lola was begging for cereal for a long time, so between cleaning those 32 things, I snatched Claire's old bowl off the counter and handed it to her.  The bowl was not plastic.  The poor girl exclaimed with joy and then dropped the bowl.  There was a porcelain-granola medley on the kitchen floor.  The cleaning process was accompanied by screams of horror from Lola, who longed to eat the medley.

All these things were big deals to me last week.  I was not doing well.  Man, my heart is selfish and bad.  I hate being inconvenienced.  I hate being pulled on and crowded around with people who don't walk as fast as I do or know what police cars are and aren't.
How dare they.  They need me to talk slowly and walk slowly and get off Pinterest.  They need me to leave the house dirty so we can braid hair and set up homes for their toy ponies.  Claire wants to know what wisdom means and Kate needs to show me her "gernastics" moves.
Lola needs me to hold her for half the day and Riley needs to feel like a grown-up and not step more than 2" from my body.
They need touching and feeling and happiness and patience.  While I'm sniveling, glaring, snapping, walking fast, talking fast, getting all my work done and feeling the great burden that is my life.  Poor me.  Do you hate me yet?  I hate me.  I wish I were good and kind, slow and patient, smiling and grateful every day.

On top of all this, these poor kids don't understand the piling up process.  They aren't in my brain and being attentive to my every sigh.  I catch them so off guard when their one little annoyance was my 37th time to be annoyed, and they had no idea I would be so highly offended by their smacking.
I guess the more kids there are, the more annoyances can pile up.  Even if Riley did keep track of her own annoyances toward me, she's not counting her sisters' too, and she just doesn't have the maturity yet to assess the whole, huge situation around us that is our home and how I might be emotionally handling it all.  That's not her job anyway.

If I saw everything in light of the gospel, I wouldn't find so much fault with my kids.  I'd be swamped with my own faults and swimming in the reality of the beauty of Christ.  I'd exude this glowing warmth, this gentleness that makes me smile kindly, explain meaningless things meaningfully, love the clinging of the needy females all around me who need me to call them beautiful, have piles of compassion for anyone who wails for their lost snack.

I've really seen the huge contrast in a day that has not begun with prayer and even just a verse of truth to set my heart in the right direction, vs. a day that I begrudge what the Lord has handed me, worship my coffee and my escape to the computer, resenting all their interruptions and neediness.  Hating their every pull on me.
I just have to wipe those lies away with the Truth.  It's such a sad day when I don't.  But when I see the beauty of Christ, all those things look so different.
Riley wakes up complaining and flipping my drawer pull, and instead of rage I can feel compassion for her heart, because I know how it is to be stuck in your selfishness.  She's being very inconsiderate, but I can lay aside my rage and really want to hug her through her selfishness and remind her where true joy lies.  Not in me getting another hour of sleep or her getting a movie.  Thank the Lord, our joy lies in something so much bigger and lasting.  The opportunities for screaming "AAHHHH!" are a million a day.  But through the lens of the gospel, those are all opportunities to point us back to Christ.