Sunday Best

Today is the "day of rest" - or is it! Do any of us really stop what we are doing on Sundays.  At least lots of Lawyers are given the day off........unless you work at one of the firms where the building never closes, the seats never cool and there is a typing pool on permanent standby! And if you don't, you probably still have access to your email at least via remote access or that accessory beloved of many Lawyers - the Blackberry!!

In fact most jobs don't really stop on Sunday, do they (and yes, you are right, I am now going to point out that parenting is a 24/7 job with a saintly and ever so slightly martyred air - feel free to blow raspberries.)

Sunday is however that little bit calmer for us - we've always had a nice Sunday routine. Way back, as commuting long-distance relationship Law-Beginners the Sunday lunch routine was indeed a sacred space for us to just, well, be! Be normal, be together, be in the potential of what we both hoped our relationship would become......domesticated and unified.  Plus of course we have a vicar in the Family, so Sunday has, for as long as I have been with Mr LAL, included worship (and tea and biscuits!).

(Hi my name is "Not a Lawyer Anymore" and I am...........................a Christian.  It's been fifteen years since I started following that bloke who said cryptic radical things about Life the Universe and Everything. If Jesus was on Twitter what would his posts have looked like? "@Judas, not cool...."  But I digress).

For our little nuclear family, our faith is like the wallpaper on the pc desktop - there underneath whatever other application is running (School Run Carnage, Housework Blitz, Money Madness, Homework Puzzle, SingStar etc etc).  My faith is one of the constants that links my life Before Escape (BE)  with my Life After Law, apart from, of course, Mr Life After Law (who has loved/put up with me through both!) - in fact the two things combine (no, Mr LAL is not a vicar, although as above we've got one in the Family).

Regular worship and Sunday school are part of our routine and provide unique opportunities to grapple with answering the impossible and or awkward questions for which very small children have a particular gift.  Most children seem to take the parts of Christianity that come attached to festivals that include gift giving and chocolate (Virgin Birth, Resurrection) in their stride.  However they are given to asking much simpler and yet impossible questions like "If the Church is God's house, where does He sleep".  (Answer: as an omnipotent Deity, anywhere He likes?!)

So did my faith make any difference to my decision to "jack it all in" - well of course, yes.  Through friends at church I had a great circle of women (if you're reading this and you know you were in it, thank you) who loved me through the very painful process of realising that something I had invested so much of my life and energy in just wasn't working out (many tears).

But of course I have family and friends  - and colleagues - who may or may not have a Christian faith but are wise and awesome and loving and who also did the same thing (thank you too) and from whom I had nothing but encouragement and support.

The biggest thing for me now is that I have faith that there is some sort of Plan (and that I followed it by giving up work) and that things will, broadly, be OK!  This faith is incredibly sustaining when one is dealing with very small pairs of unspeakably soiled underwear or coping with a small person in total meltdown about (I enumerate them thusly):
the "wrong" Cheerios
it still being dark but also being the morning (seriously)
the favourite shirt having a missing button
the bus going the wrong way past the car (it's a circular route, so 50:50 chance on this one.)

How does it go "He who would valiant be, gainst all disaster (eg missing the most up to date episode of Scooby Doo).........well I guess that would be me, and I feel pretty valiant (well, today anyway).

Now, has anyone got any stain remover, chocolate weetos (NOT honey cheerios), buttons and thread, a bus timetable and some way of re-setting the equinox....................................