Have a Holiday all the time

Welcome to the spacious life

We had an eventful day yesterday, that mainly was the result of a bad parenting decision I made.

I woke yesterday morning, to my sons practising tackling. After telling them it wasn’t appropriate behaviour inside, they immediately asked the obvious question: “Can we get dressed and go outside then?”

A number of things went through my mind, the main one was that one of them would definitely get hurt. It is interesting to know as a parent how much to let your kids learn from experience, and how much to keep them safe. Leeanne tends towards keeping them safe and I tend towards letting them learn from experience.

After explaining to the boys that one of them would almost certainly get hurt, I let them go for it.

About 20 minutes later I heard loud sobs coming from the front yard and Josh came inside saying “Daniel thinks that his neck is broken”.

Fortunately it wasn’t his neck, it was his collar-bone, and he has managed the pain quite remarkably.

We spent yesterday making the trip to get an x-ray, and because we were in town, doing some shopping.

It wasn’t what we had planned but in the end the day worked out very well.

I was reminded how much “holiday” can actually be a state of mind rather than a state of calendar.

Often I can feel like I need to change my external circumstances to fix my internal world. The thing is that no matter where you go, you take your inner world with you.

What could have felt like a disaster, ended up being an adventure both for Daniel and also the family.

This morning in my quiet time I read what Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

Daniel’s accident reminded me that most of us don’t get to choose all that life dishes up to us every day, we do get to choose however how we respond to it.

On holidays it feels like you can make choices with your time, and that is precious, however that choice isn’t actually taken away from me next week.

I still have the chance to make choices in ‘normal life’, it’s just that often I don’t feel like I do.

As I get ready to come home, I have the sense that God is inviting me to live the “spacious life” all the time, and not just when I have space.