Another Saturday come and gone

Around here, Saturdays are jam-packed with action. I love it. I pickup a couple of vanloads of kids in the morning, have a cell group of 8-10 kids at my house for lunch and prayer and then another family of kids who used to be our neighbours but have since moved away, stay through the afternoon and we have dinner together. By 7:30, if all goes well, the kids are home, dishes are done and the rug is vacuumed.

The one thing though, that is done first first first, before all else, is the meticulous cleaning of the bathroom. Especially around - you guessed it - the toilet.

Rob and I don't have any children that we've birthed ourselves, so my experience with little boys and girls coming into this ministry here in Charlotte was negligible. I learned right quick about the bathroom.

I've learned that little boys have poor aim.

Little girls aren't much better.

A bottle of hand soap that started out full this morning will inevitably be mostly gone by tonight, with globs in the sink, on the sink, around the sink and on the wall, and if you wait too long, they harden into hygienic cement, that you have to pry off with your husband's toothbrush. haha.

Any little rugs around the toilet and all bath mats should be put up for the duration of children's time over, because if they can miss the toilet and hit the linoleum, who's to say they won't ricochet onto the rug? The difference is, you can tell when someone's hit the linoleum, because you may unexpectedly hit a wet spot and slide across it. With the rug, something may (just as unexpectedly) soak into your sock, but in those moments, you fervently hope that it's just water...

Any hair products, skin care and beauty products located in the bathroom are fair game, and will be sprayed, smoothed and lathered...

At this tender age, apparently flushing is optional...and once you get three or four little folks in a row sans flush, you know you got to go for the plunger. How does so much come out of such little bodies? Yikes.

If, by the end of the evening, I happen to notice that the toilet tissue roll (that I put on fresh this morning) has been ravaged, and all that remains are mere wisps of useful material, I know, without a doubt, that I will need to throw every towel/facecloth/scrap of material that is within an arm's reach of the the toilet into the washing machine with a dollop of bleach - better to be safe then sorry. And man, I'd be really, really sorry...

Always disinfect the doorknob. I shudder to think of what a scientific sampling would find growing on that thing.

Inevitably, all of the 3-5 year old children will have to go all at the same time
"IT'S AN EMERGENCY!" they'll all try to go at once, no one will 'make it' and you'll have to rustle up at least three pairs of alternate pants out of the donation bin. Although good for comic relief, 3 year old boys in 18month old pants is a sad, sorry, silly sight, and it makes them a little testy...

THEN, you'll forget about the state of the bathroom, because you're so focused on getting these little kids out of fouled-up clothes, and your husband will enter into the restroom for some 'quiet time' and flee in horror, because not only has he slid on something wet on the linoleum, he soaked his socks on the rug and then the smell...the indescribable smell...well, even a grown man cannot endure it.

In all seriousness though, there are things that I'm learning here that mean a lot to me. And they're worth it, even though it's hard to be away from family and home. Tonight I looked at pictures online of my cousin's first baby, Ava. I wept, because she is so lovely, because I miss my cousin, because life back home continues whether I am there or not, and it's hard to be geographically absent in the lives of those that I love. My promise from God about all that is

"Jesus said, "Mark my words, no one who sacrifices house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, land—whatever—because of me and the Message will lose out. They'll get it all back, but multiplied many times in homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land—but also in troubles." Mark 10:29-30

So when I do return home, I will have wee cousins running around that love me and want to be picked up and twirled around, houses full of family that would love to have me in, church family who have been praying for me for years and a brother who would sit and watch a movie with his older sister...yup, I'll have it all in London. In Toronto, in Vancouver and in Charlotte...and houses, family, brothers, sisters and children wherever else the Lord chooses to whisk us away to...it's a multiplication of blessings, and that's the kind of math that I can totally understand!