The pressure's on!!

I love pressure cookers. Just like the crock pot, they are a homemaker's true friend. I kind of think that pressure cookers and slow cookers are BFFs, you know? Opposites attract, and balancing out each other's differences. So a pressure cooker works to cook food super fast, but without rendering chicken into rubber like its high-tech cousin, the microwave. Lock the lid on, turn up the heat, let the pressure build up inside = results in a fraction of the time.

There's this post that I love, this post that I come back to and read over and over - this post about how sometimes there are so many external stressors and pressures in our lives that we feel like we're living in a pressure cooker. But as she says in the post, the pressure in our lives does the work when we let it.

I was telling Hubby the other night that I sometimes feel like our children live in a pressure cooker too. Always being together - this homeschooling that keeps siblings in one anothers' faces and spaces all the time - well, it can certainly bring out many (infinite) opportunities for discipleship that we might otherwise miss out on while our children are still so young; all their ugly comes bubbling right up to the surface and we see it every time, rather than them getting old enough to learn how to hide it. You know, like we grown-ups do.

I do realize that my kids (like anyone) need a little downtime and time away from one another some times, but getting them away from one another is only treating the symptom - the shouting, or the snatching, or the hitting - and not treating the disease: sin and folly bound up in our hearts.

So I feel like I live in a pressure cooker: kids fighting, crying, wanting; phone ringing; things breaking; fridge emptying; homemaking and housekeeping beckoning; husband and children needing.

I recently met with a friend, one of my mommy-mentors, and she gave me this excellent perspective on our children's hearts: How, until they are saved and possess the Holy Spirit themselves, we are their mediator. I began to chew that over in the days following our momma-time, and I started thinking...How many times a day does the Holy Spirit convict my heart: Whoops, that wasn't very wholesome talk to build them up. Yikes, that was a sharp tone of voice. Oops, thinking unkind things about that driver in front of me. Oh, not submitting with a glad heart to Hub's decision about this thing...

The list.goes.on.and.on.

And until my sweet babies have and are attuned to this Voice of God, that is my job for them. So if some audible voice were calling me out for my every sin all day, I'm sure that it would feel relentless! If some other person were responsible for rebuking me for every offense, I bet they would feel like lamenting that some days all they do is correct-correct-correct all the live-long day.

Sound familiar, mommas? ;)

So, while Ann Voskamp says that for us - the saved believers listening to that Voice - we must simply submit, and let the pressure do its work...for my children who are also living in a pressure cooker, I must simply submit...and persevere and do my work. Cooking them is often my cooking, if you get my drift. :)

And the pressure is on.

{Sincere apologies for awful pun.}

Would you forgive me if I shared an actual pressure cooker recipe with you? :)

ps - Look!!! A reasonable-length post from me about something serious on my heart!!! Write it on your calendar, it's not likely to happen again for a while. ;)