"For this day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength." ~Nehemiah 8:10

Once again I'm having to "close the gap" from my last post. Life around the Peters home is just busy. We don't have to be going anywhere or have any extra-cirricular activities to keep our lives well exercised. Life with five little 'uns is enough.
January has been a challenging month in many ways. The restart of our homeschool co-op offered me a challenge as I attempted to keep my four little ones occupied while we sat in on Anna's class sessions. We did have a couple extra weeks to prepare as we battled illnesses and were blessed by a snow day. Once we did get back to co-op I was greatly surprised at how well everyone did. Thankfully, a dear lady from church has joyfully kept Elly and Ezekiel the last couple times, which has allowed me to focus during the class time and lend a hand when needed.
Matthew has been exceedingly busy, adding on an overnight trip to his monthly hospital/office/dialysis routine. Even with all the demands on his time, Matthew seems to never run short on patience and love for his little ones and me. He is usually just a phone call away when I need a boost or one of the kids needs to chat with Daddy.

On the homefront, we are dutifully marching on with school. I am constantly amazed at how their little minds are just sponges, soaking up all the information offered to them. I am quite often serenaded by little girl voices singing their history sentence for the week, or skip counting the squares and cubes. And more than once I've been shocked to hear little Elly singing some piece of memory work or chanting our timeline.

Even with all this wonderful learning and growing, we still manage to have days (sometimes a whole string of them) where we are NOT firing on all cylinders. There have been moments when the girls are all weeping, Zeke is tugging at my pant leg wanting to me to pick him up, and Jude is waking from his nap that I just stand in the middle of it all and cry. Does anyone else have that feeling that everybody wants a piece of me and all that is left are tears? Perhaps it's just me, but I have a strong feeling that I'm not alone in this.
Anyway, I was surprised at the impact a very brief verse from Nehemiah has had on me the last couple of days. The Lord had pressed it upon Nehemiah's heart to return to Jerusalem and rebuild its walls and gates. He obeys and succeeds, even in the midst of great opposition and threats. Once the walls and gates were completed, the people were preparing to celebrate the feast of tabernacles in the customary way. They built the little huts on the roofs of their houses and in the streets and Ezra the priest read from the Book of the Law. As they listened, the people wept. Nehemiah told them to go and enjoy the feast because it was a day sacred to the Lord. That's when he said, "Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength." (Neh. 8:10)
As I've been pondering this verse and the context it was set in, a few different thoughts have occured to me:
1. It's likely that the people were weeping because the reading of the Law exposed their sin of not keeping the law;
2. Nehemiah doesn't brush off their concern for their sin, but he draws their focus off of themselves and on to God and;
3. There is strength when we find joy in the Lord, not when we try to conjure it ourselves.
It's really the last thought that I've been wrestling with. In the middle of the struggles and commotion, how on earth am I to have joy? I don't think Nehemiah meant the giddy, bubbly joy you get when you watch your kids tear open that much hoped for birthday gift. I think it's more like the joy I remember having while in labor with each of my children. For nearly 40 weeks I had bore each child, enduring morning sickness, terrible leg cramps, and gradual loss of sleep. In labor there was constant, sometimes intense pain. But all the while I had a great joy at what the Lord was giving us. The tears during labor were not merely in response to the pain or fatigue, but they were tears of hope and the assurance that I'd finally get to meet my child. I'm thinking that that is the kind of joy Nehemiah is referring to. The joy of knowing that, in the midst of the tears and struggle, there is knowledge that the Lord is at work and hope for a wonderful reward at the end. It is in that joy that we receive the strength of the Lord to carry on, to stay the course, to place our trust in Him.