What’s the song of your heart today?

How This Matters to a Mom

Let's be honest about what the song of a mom's morning actually sounds like.

It's noisy. It's heavy metal far more often than it's classical. There's a child crying, a teenager being angsty and using you as the safe place to dump the day's stress, a deadline already slipping, the clank of a dropped dish, and underneath all of it that steady chorus of "Mom, Johnny is being mean again, Mom, Johnny took my toy." And somewhere inside that racket, you're quietly trying to find a little peace.

Here's what keeps striking me. God bothered to notice music at all. Right there in the middle of a heavy chapter about the fall and the first family, Scripture pauses to name the first person who ever played the harp and the flute.

C.S. Lewis once said that things like art and friendship have no survival value, and that instead they're among the things that give value to survival. Music doesn't keep you alive. It makes the being alive worth something.

So when God takes the time to notice it, He's reminding us that life was never meant to be only the mundane and the work. There's joy and wonder woven through it, and the more we can catch the magical moments inside the noise, the more we start to hear that there's a bigger symphony playing, and it's not a rigid one. It can laugh. It can find humor even when your little one is mid-tantrum.

I've been practicing this with my own teenage daughter. When on some days there's been a pattern of whining for a bit, I've started saying, "My love, if you're whining, that must mean you need a hug." And she then laughs and pulls back and says, "No, no, I don't need that," and the tune in the air has already changed. She feels acknowledged but also she realizes she's a big girl now who is capable and smart and doesn't need me to pick her up anymore like when she was a toddler.

We do get a choice about what kind of harmony we play in the orchestra of our life. When someone around us is having a hard time and the sound they're making is discordant, matching it is the normal, human thing to do, reacting in kind.

But we get to choose something else instead. We can pause, breathe a short prayer, check in with Jesus for just a second, and hum our own different tune, grounded in Him rather than in whatever noise just walked into the room. Sometimes that's enough for the hard moment to soften and meet a more melodious note on its own.

None of us will ever be perfectly tuned to God, because, not unlike our own children, sometimes we like to beat our own drum or play that recorder out of tune. But He stays perfectly in tune with us. The more we lean in and abide with Him, the more in tune we become, and the more that rubs off on the people around us and changes the music in the room.

So the small thing you can do this morning is breathe. You don't have to be reactive to everyone around you. You can respond, and you can respond from a settled place, because your whole sense of self is rooted in Christ and it's not gone in an instant every time the house gets loud.

All those unharmonious moments can be thought of as unscheduled learning opportunities, your children watching how you navigate a morning that refuses to go smoothly. Because the truth is, it's never going to be perfect. It's only ever going to be imperfectly beautiful, and maybe that disharmony is exactly where love gets to show itself best. A hard morning is exactly the kind of place where love has room to shine, in contrast, in a way it never could in a house that was already calm. And the best part is knowing Jesus is right in the midst, and is available, like a metronome to help you recalibrate your tune, whenever you but ask for his wisdom.