A Colorado family found itself in a big panic this morning when they thought their six-year-old son had found his way into the gondola of an experimental balloon, managed to untether it, and then floated 10,000 feet above the earth.
For several hours the cable news channels followed the story, their cameras trained on the silvery, lopsided object that looked more like an inflated chefs hat than the hot-air balloons of old.
When the balloon finally came to rest, rescuers found no boy inside.
Turns out he'd been hiding in his family's attic the whole time.
I watched this saga play out on a TV mounted high up in the corner of a local deli where I went with my mom and my children for lunch before running some errands. My heart was heavy as I thought about the mother of this boy and how worried she must have been. When my own four-year-old son came around the table to give me a hug, I hugged him just a little bit tighter than usual.
There we were, I thought to myself, sitting solidly on terra firma, our stomachs content from a lunch of soup and fruit and sandwiches, with a beautiful day outside and the possibility of stopping by a local church's pumpkin patch to pick up some live autumn decor.
A perfectly ordinary day. Perfect in its ordinariness. Extraordinary in its perfection.
We ran those errands and we did visit that pumpkin patch. As I watched my kids cavorting among the pumpkins, picking them up, turning them over, hollering to each other about this one or that, I couldn't help feeling blessed and sorrowful at the same time.
Blessed, because my children were all there and well and happy and fed and I was with them to witness it. Sorrowful, because I knew that just like that mother in Colorado there were many other mothers who, for one reason or another, were separated from their children and that there was nothing I could do about it.
For all the mothers who read this 'blog entry -- but especially those who homeschool their children and who sometimes feel like they haven't done enough, their kids aren't brilliant enough and their houses aren't tidy enough -- I hope it will encourage you to think of the most mundane of days as the greatest gift you've ever received.
If you got to be with your children today and everyone was alive and well, you were richly blessed.
Praise God for ordinary days!
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