Small and Simple Things

We spent last weekend in Savannah.

It was a lovely weekend filled to the brim with family and friends and laughter and delicious food.  The Boy was delighted with Pa-Pa's house and has been asking to go back to Pa-Pa's house and play since we got back.

We've spent the week, dragging ourselves through our chores and work and routine.  And I've been reading and pondering on the events of a bright day 10 years ago.  I've been watching the clips of people talking about how their lives changed.  I've been remembering the people who changed my own life.  And how very grateful I am for this little life of mine.  It's not Important.  It's not Influential.  It's not Popular by any means.  It's small and quiet, but it's important to me.

I remember before having the Boy the distinct feeling that I didn't want to bring a child into this world.  This horribly flawed and failing world.

But I look at him now and I realize that by bringing him here, with his heart and his faith and his beautiful eyes that see the world so clearly, that I have made the world better than it was before.  Every time he smiles, I see that the world is a boy-sized bit happier, every time he laughs (and he makes everyone laugh around him) the world is a boy-sized bit happier, and that's when I knew.

That it wasn't books and learning, it wasn't bombs or guns, it wasn't a Nobel prize winning peace plan that made the world a little bit better.  It was a Boy.  As small and simple as that sounds, it is a great and wondrous thing that has happened.  And not just in my life, but in my family's life.  In Chris' family's life.  In the lives of everyone who knows him.

And on this particular day, when I remember so many husband and wife and father and mother and son and daughter shaped holes left in the world by folding steel and breaking glass, by planes turned into bombs and men turned against fellow man, I am profoundly grateful for the little bit of boy-shaped good that I've been able to bring into the world.