Beauty-Full

"Mommy, mommy, wake up!" she says running into my bedroom, eyes wide with wonder. 

It's 6:40 a.m., and normally this kind of wake-up call frustrates me and leaves me fighting to respond kindly. 

Honestly, I've been feeling quite stuck in my irritation regarding the wake-up calls. 

This morning, though, mercy is new, and it plays out into reality when the Spirit whispers to pay attention to the wonder spread across her face ... that it's worth the loss of sleep. 

Somehow I manage responding, "Good morning, pumpkin. What is it?"

"You want see something sooo bootiful?" she asks excitedly, in all her four-year-old giddyness.

"Yes," I muster with as much genuine excitement as I can for 6:41 a.m.

"In my room!! Look out my window!" she says leading me there with my hand in her. 

We pull back the curtains and soft lovely wisps of pink and orange spread across the sky just above our garage. We can't see the whole thing but we see just enough to understand the lovely of it.

"Wow," I say. " That is pretty!"

I ponder for a moment a crossroads of choice as it enters my head; I could thank her for sharing with me and go back to bed, grateful to have seen just a glimpse of lovely .... or I could put in a little more extra effort and see if there's something more to glimpse by climbing to the top floor and glimpsing out the full-view windows.

 "I have an idea," I say. "Let's look from upstairs so we can see the whole sky."

"Ok!" 

We venture upstairs, soft golden glows of sun light on our path and as we walk over to the window; it's even more full of beauty than we could have imagined; it's beauty-full, if ever there was a working definition. 

We marvel at the sky together for a moment, and I thank her for sharing this with me. 

Her eyes shine and her smile beams. I silently thank God for prompting me to respond differently from my normal response this morning.

In my spirit, I know there are so many times I choose to stay stuck in the same places not ever choosing to get out of bed because it seems like too much work or choosing to do just the bare minimum and being happy enough with little glimmers of lovely, forgoing the bigger picture of beauty-full because I'm happy with the little bits of beauty. 

But, I don't want to cheat myself or the worthy hearts in this house of shared beauty because I'm stuck. And the longer I sit in that understanding or stuckness, the more I know that we weren't meant for stuckness and just the little bits of beauty we can manage to glimpse from our anchored position; we were meant for beautiful -- beauty-full. 

Today, let's move.

Let's choose the fullness.