Love Covers a Multitude

We live only eight miles from the college campus where we work, but we pass ample numbers of Dunkin' Donuts and church bulletin boards on our way. There are those faith communities like ours that use their bulletin boards for facts: "Church Fair, 10am Saturday." There are other communities that use their boards to provoke, to reach out, to draw in. Though Matt regularly asks, "Do they honestly get anyone through the door because a free pass to heaven was advertised outside?" something about the process seems to be satisfactory or fun for them. And hey, we certainly comment often enough on the clichéd messages they post.

In honor of Mother's Day, I suspect, one such bulletin board recently boasted, "Love Covers a Multitude." The words struck me--in part, the phrase sounded incomplete (a multitude of what??? sin??? is that the original phrase?); in part, the phrase struck true somewhere inside me. I felt the truth in motion yesterday when Matt and I both woke tired and, dare I say it? GRUMPY! Our children are in a cycle of very poor sleep, and despite the predictability of their current habits, it just doesn't feel good to go to bed at 12am, wake with Lucas at 2am, settle Kyra in sleeping bags on our floor at 3:30am, wake again with Lucas at 5am, decide to bring him to our bed where we will all wake unhappily at 7am, already about a half hour behind our "what we need to do to get to school/work on time" schedule. Feel free to refer me to Super Nanny or Nanny 911, suggest any number of helpful sleep resources....we know what we can and must do, and we haven't yet mustered the energy or desire to train our kids back to full nights of sleep. We are in coping mode, at least until commencement.

Anyway, I digress....Matt and I are both a bit on the selfish side, by nature, and we are also prone to being a bit negative when we are tired, so these exhausted mornings often leave us grumbling internally and sometimes externally about who got up at what times during the night, who is doing more to get the kids ready and moving, who should stop reading the cereal box and stand up to finish the lunches, who is ultimately at fault/to blame for our being late to work yet again....you can imagine the inner dialogue. Yesterday was no exception, and I could actually feel the friction between us, despite that neither of us had exchanged a word about who actually dared to sit down and eat breakfast as opposed to carrying something on the road, or who was taking the time to look up the address for the after-school program when that letter could easily be mailed from work.

After much coaxing and prodding for kids to get shoes on, coats on, teeth brushed, hair brushed, we were finally ready to depart. Loaded down with laptops and lunchboxes, I spontaneously turned toward Matt, said "Good morning," and gave him the kiss we both deserved to start our days. It was an hour and a half later than it should have been given, and prompted a day's worth of discussion with Kyra about the ways in which two consenting adults can kiss versus parent/child kisses or kid to kid kisses, but that brief moment in time did, indeed, cover a multitude. Ah, how little it takes to choose love, but often we overlook the opportunity.

Choose some love today....get some, give some, feel it deep within. Find all that it can cover in your life.