Cathedrals

I was browsing around the internet (ignoring my messy kitchen and whiny kids, does that make me an awful mom? hmm...) and found a video about a mom and her struggles in parenting her kids. The video is titled "The Invisible Woman." And how true this can be, as moms (and this applies to dads too), we become invisible to our kids, a noise to be ignored, an obstacle in the path to whatever they're running towards... And becoming invisible is really depressing. Don't they respect me or love me or (fill in the blank) me enough to pay attention to me?

The video puts this into perspective. A friend of the speaker gave her a book on cathedrals. And in the front, the friend wrote "With admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees."

The cathedrals were built by hunderds of workers over decades and sometimes more than a hundred years. The men that built the cathedrals do not have their names inscribed on a plaque giving them credit, history does not recognize them individually for their acheivement. Parenting often does not bring us credit for our individual acheivements, we earn no plaque or ceremony. But God sees our efforts, big and small, and turns those efforts into a beautiful person. A cathedral we will not see finished, but that will bear the mark of our efforts over our lifetimes.