As “tov” as it seems

Anyone with little ones has been told in some form or another, probably more times than they can count, “Enjoy every moment. The years go by so fast.” There have been times when the constant drumbeat of the needs around me have made that admonition feel like a heavy weight. I mean, do you even understand the number of dirty diapers I’ve changed in a day?! I feel the speed, the inertia of the years passing by, but enjoyment can feel elusive when limitless needs are met with my glaring limitations.

For years, I have been asking God to help me be awake to his goodness in the land of the living, like the psalmist prayed. It has been slow work on this heart that is prone to love optimization and efficiency more than the gentle rhythms of grace. But in this season I have been experiencing what I have asked him for. Even the hard days that once seemed narrow now have an expansiveness to them. I’m in a broad place, and I know it, and the deep goodness of these tender, soon-gone days is not lost on me. Thanks be to God.

In God’s mercy, some things, even with their inherent imperfections and difficulties, really are as truly good as they seem, as wonderful as you hope they’ll be.

This world is broken, yes, but as the recipients and stewards of the abundance of the Triune God, let’s not grow jaded. Just as our Creator made us in the garden and called us “tov”—a humming, perpetually life-giving, self-offering, endlessly potential-filled good, we bear his image by naming and holding up “tov” when we recognize it, an act of hope and of defiance in the face of all that isn’t right in the world and in our hearts.

When something—a marriage, a friendship, a moment with your child, an unseasonably warm day spent outside—is as shiningly beautiful as we imagined it would be, could we lift a hand in gratitude to the Giver of all good things, and receive it as a reminder of the goodness in which we were made and a foretaste of the never-ceasing “tov” of his coming Kingdom?