This weekend was one for the books—and not just the ones I read aloud to my kids on Sunday night.
It started off beautifully. Two incredible date nights in a row, which almost never happens. We ate good food, enjoyed adult conversation, and soaked in those rare moments where we get to just be “us” instead of parents, chauffeurs, and household managers. By Friday night, I was feeling rested, happy, and ready for the week ahead.
And then—life happened.
In the middle of the night, I woke up to my little one struggling to breathe. That deep, panicked, mom-instinct kind of wake-up where your body is moving before your brain even catches up. We rushed to the ER, where she was given breathing treatments and steroids. She was a champ through it all, but then… she threw up. All over both of us.
I had thought ahead enough to pack a change of clothes for her—gold star for me—but not for myself. Which meant I spent the rest of the ER visit smelling very much like the situation. The nurse staff, unfortunately, never came to change the sheet we were sitting on, so I took the sheet off the bed, wiped it down, and we sat on the bare plastic mattress.
Eventually, we got to go home, where I continued breathing treatments throughout the day to keep her stable. In the middle of all of this, I was trying to prepare my children’s sermon and Bible study for Sunday. I was also supposed to take my five-year-old to a birthday party and later a playdate—but with two sick kids, those plans went right out the window. On Saturday, during naptime, my husband took our youngest for a run so I could sneak in a quick power nap—a small but much-needed gift after the long night. The whole day felt chaotic, one of those “everything was planned and then nothing happened” kinds of days.
By Sunday evening, the girls would normally be at gymnastics, but after the sleepless night at the ER, I was done. Instead, we stayed home. We painted, played with slime, and cuddled. The girls brought me book after book after book, and we read them all. I broke out my fun voices, my five-year-old read along to her sister, and my one-year-old repeated every word and animal sound she heard. In that moment, the weekend chaos faded, and it was just us—laughing, reading, and being together.
Monday morning came, and I was back in “real life” mode—only now with hot chocolate spilled all over my car on the way to work. It felt like the perfect, slightly absurd ending to a weekend that had already zigzagged between romance, exhaustion, worry, and joy.
Life doesn’t usually unfold the way I plan it. But this weekend reminded me that some of the sweetest moments happen after plans unravel—the cuddles, the giggles, the shared stories, even the hot chocolate disasters.
And so, here I am, tired but grateful, getting ready to preach this Sunday. Because in the middle of the mess, there’s still beauty—and that’s worth talking about.
Life doesn’t usually unfold the way I plan it. But this weekend reminded me that some of the sweetest moments happen after plans unravel—the cuddles, the giggles, the shared stories, even the hot chocolate disasters.
This is what I love about Variable Faith—it’s about finding God’s presence in the shifting, unpredictable, sometimes messy rhythms of life. Faith isn’t lived only in the perfectly planned days, but in the midnight ER runs, the tired Sunday evenings, and the laughter over slime and storybooks. It’s about trusting that God is steady even when nothing else feels steady.