Can I eat the Pancake?
I want to tell you what my four year old taught me this week.
We were eating breakfast. Our usual right now. Pancakes, strawberries, blackberries, and a smoothie with lots of hidden veggies. The kids gobble it up every time. But lately, right in the middle of the bites, my daughter looks up and asks what her snack is going to be.
I say something like, let’s eat what’s in front of you first. Or we can talk about that later. And then the list starts. Maybe a banana… Maybe yogurt. On and on while her plate still has food on it.
I feel the frustration rise every single time. As a stay at home mom, I’m the one responsible for every bite that goes into my kids’ mouths and I would love thirty seconds to just enjoy my own breakfast before my brain gets dragged to snacks and lunch.
It’s not only breakfast either. We’ll be home and she wants the park. We get to the park and fifteen minutes in, she’s asking to go home. We’ll be riding in the car with my husband, windows down, music loud, running errands together as a family, and in the middle of the fun she starts asking how much longer until we get home.
I know some of this is just she’s four. But the thing that actually gets me is that she can’t seem to just be where she is. She’s already reaching for what’s next before she’s even finished with what’s now.
So I brought it to the Lord, and He didn’t waste any time showing me something.
I do the exact same thing.
I ask Him for something, He gives it to me, and instead of sitting in the gratitude, my brain immediately goes to…okay, what’s next.
There was a season I longed to be married. I’ve been married for almost six years now. There was a season I feared I’d never carry a baby. I have two. There was a season I dreamed of staying home to raise them. I’m living it right now, today, as I write this.
Every single one of these was once a prayer whispered in the dark, and God, in His faithfulness, answered it. But if I’m fully transparent, I often forget the value of these gifts, and contentment slips right through my fingers and gets replaced with, thanks Lord….what’s next???
We moved to Georgia this year. That move was a dream I carried and prayed over for years. Now that I’m here, if I let my thoughts run unchecked, they slide into…
this rental company is a headache
I can’t wait to own my home again
I can’t wait to be on a quieter road with more land.
Meanwhile I forget I once asked God for this exact house. We prayed for a room with built in bookshelves and we got it. I forget that when something breaks, I’m not the one paying to fix it. I have a neighbor who has shown up on my porch multiple times with a full course meal for no reason at all. I have a basement and an attic and more square footage than our last home ever gave us. It would be so easy to complain there’s no hall closet, and completely miss everything I actually have.
And God is asking a tender question underneath all of this.
What happens if you don’t rush through this?
Get still and notice everything around you.
The invitation is simple.
He’s not pressuring me to become a perfectly content person for the rest of my life.
But simply…just in this moment, right now, can you be content.
Can I eat the pancake. Can I hear the music with the windows down. Can I walk through my house and actually let myself register, I asked for this.
I keep coming back to the bookshelves. I stood in front of them today and just looked, and I thought about the woman who once prayed for exactly this, and how easily I walk past them now without a second glance.
God isn’t pointing this out to shame me. It’s more like He’s inviting me somewhere higher. A place where I can actually enter into His presence, because scripture says that is done through praise and thanksgiving (psalm 100:4). A place where I can sit in an ordinary moment and let it be sweet without rushing past it to the next thing on the list.
This is a sneaky trap. It’s easy to live in the what’s next. My daughter does it mid pancake. I do it mid blessing. And somewhere in there, without ever meaning to, I think I’ve handed that same restlessness down to her.
Here’s what I believe though. God brings things UP to bring them OUT.
Maybe this isn’t really about fixing my daughter’s restlessness at all. Maybe she just handed me a mirror to see my own restlessnes. To pause and notice what’s actually here, right now, that I once asked God for.
Praise God I don’t have to lecture my four year old into gratitude. I get to live it in front of her. That’s what Paul was talking about when he said he’d learned to be content in all things in Philippians 4:12. He learned it. It wasn’t natural to him either. My kids don’t need a speech about gratitude. They need to watch their mom actually practice it.
So tomorrow, when she asks about her snack in the middle of breakfast, I intentionally won’t make it a big deal in my mind. I’ll be grateful for her reminder to live in the present. I’ll just catch my own “what’s next” before it pulls me out of the moment, and I’ll come back to what’s actually in front of me.
We’re here. This is what’s happening. This was once a prayer.
1 Timothy 6:6–8
Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth.
