The first task on my to-do list was to clean the fridge.
I hate cleaning fridges.
But she had a nurse visiting who could help with the infant twins that morning, so my work was focused on cleaning the home and prepping food rather than helping with babies.
However, I couldn’t resist checking in on the teeny, tiny boys in the next room.
I picked one of them up, saying I could burp him that time. I put the thin blanket over my shoulder and laid his belly against my chest and over my shoulder. His head bobbled around, barely able to hold itself up.
That’s when he puked—but not on the cloth. Inside my shirt.
The nurse covered her mouth to stifle her laugh. The mother just stared at me with her lips pressed together. “I’m so sorry!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. “It’s fine. It’s all good.” I handed her back the baby and went to the bathroom to clean myself up.
That was my first day, and I wouldn’t be the mom I am today without that first day and all the days after it.
I spent the year before my first son was born working for my pastor’s wife as a “mommy’s helper.” I dressed and changed the infant twins, played with the two older children, prepped meals, sterilized breastfeeding equipment, dusted ledges, and scrubbed floors. But this was so much more than a job—it was a mentorship, a generous outpouring of one mom’s hard-earned wisdom to another.
Bathing babies was not just a lesson in how to properly bathe an infant, but a lesson in the gentle care of a mother even while at the end of a hectic, exhausting day. Chopping carrots became a lesson in being a patient teacher to a little girl who needed a bit extra attention since losing her role as the youngest of the family. Learning to fold a fitted sheet taught me how we can love our families with the smallest, tangible acts. I learned the importance of meal planning, budgeting your time, and how to love your child even when you’re disciplining them for wrong behaviour.
No book or podcast could ever replicate what I gained by walking to that parsonage every weekday morning.
Being in need is something we often resent. We don’t want to ask for help; it makes us feel weak, less than. I should be able to do this on my own—like so and so. Yet we don’t realize the gift we give when we reach out for help—or the gifts we could give to those coming alongside us.
Perhaps by having a young girl come in to clean your home is a chance to imbue the wisdom gained by your silver crown. Maybe asking for help with childcare for your littles as a homeschooling mom to seven is a chance to pass along the beauty of a home education to the next generation. Perhaps asking your young adult grandchild to move in so they can help you with yard work is a chance to give them what you once hoped to impart to their parents.
As Paul told the church in Corinth, there’s a reason everyone isn’t a foot—we need hands, eyes, stomachs, and elbows too. Being in need is a time to be generous, if we allow it. If we let pride keep us burrowed within ourselves, then we withhold the talents our Master has entrusted to us. You see, it’s not just our skills that God has entrusted to us; it’s our experience too. As Kelly Kapic writes,
God created us for the mutual dependence and delight within a life-giving community: that isn’t merely a goal; it’s how we are built. Part of the mission of the church is to serve as such a community, thus providing an Edenic oasis amid this fractured world, pointing toward a time when shalom will again reign unhindered. [1]
We do a disservice to our siblings in Christ (and even the onlooking world) when we withhold our neediness and don’t allow them to serve us. It’s another kind of prideful greed altogether: we’d rather expend all our resources and abilities caring for ourselves, independent of anyone else, than allow someone else into our life and give them the opportunity to serve and learn from us. Yet we put redemption and Christ on display as we allow our weaknesses to be seen and generously offer what we have to another through letting them serve us.
My pastor’s wife and her family moved away several years ago, but we keep in touch through text and Christmas cards still to this day. We reminisced over that first day I had all those years ago, and she told me how embarrassed she was to ask me to clean her fridge.
I laughed it off and told her it was my job, she had nothing to be ashamed of. But what I should have told her is that she gave me much more than I ever could have given her by asking me to clean her fridge that day.
[1] Kelly Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 177.
The featured image, “Japanese Peony,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Lara d’Entremont is first a wife and a mom to three little wildlings in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. While the wildlings snore, she primarily writes—whether it be personal essays, creative nonfiction, or fantasy novels. She desires to weave the stories between faith and fiction, theology and praxis, for women who feel as if these pieces of them are always at odds. Her first book, A Mother Held, is a collection of essays on the early days of motherhood and anxiety. Much of her writing is inspired by the forest and ocean that surround her, and her little ones that remind her to stop and see it.
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