The Change The World Needs Most

Wednesday night. Seven o'clock and all's well. The troops have devoured the chicken and rice and fast re-manned their rubber-band catapult: hundreds of elastics tied together in a ten-foot chain, each end secured to a piano bench leg. Belting Johnny Horton's, "Sink the Bismarck," Seth pulls the catapult's centre taut and on Ammon's command launches the missile: a flannel  beanbag that grazes Baby Benson, oblivious of danger, absorbed in  his blocks. Cheers erupt. Spencer and Lorrin unsheathe their cardboard daggers from duct tape scabbards and brandish them, hurrahing. Only little Dalen objects. He glares from beneath his red plastic fire hat,  his hands groping out from the blue plastic fire coat that droops to his boot-tops. He aims a threatening fire hose (two interlocked toy train tracks) at Major General Ammon and Lieutenant General Seth. "You guys!" he demands, in Benson's defence. "Go to school!" His brothers just laugh.

I should be putting them to bed. Instead I'm chewing a pen, drumming a notebook (the old paper kind), and fumbling for inspiration for my most audacious essay ever: "The Change the World Needs Most and How to Achieve It," the culminating assignment of my current events course. What business a stay-at-home mother of six has with a current events course still eludes me. I can't quite defend the difference it makes to my six boys in Raymond who governs Egypt or which weapons belong to Syria or why I even care to grasp the cycles of history.

"If we're worried about the world, let's look to the upbringing of our children," my husband suggests---and he's right. I know he's right.

That's why I'm taking the course.

That's why I'm devouring Oliver DeMille, Strauss and Howe, Orrin Woodward, and John Naisbitt like my six little boys scarf down chicken and rice---all simultaneously, six books at once, with audios while I wash dishes and the next-to-read list ever-growing. I rarely scan more than a page or two between diaper changes,  Mother Goose readings, Band-Aid-ing, and bottomless pit control; yet every glance I steal harasses my heart's conflict: is this worth it?

It is, insist my insides.

The boys waging beanbag warfare today may tomorrow man weapons more deadly---unless I bring them up to change the world some other way.

Intermingled with "The Bismarck," a counter-melody ensues: Spencer is singing his school song. His kindergarten teacher, Sue Olsen, composed it:

We are the rising generation, we're the future of our world.

We are children making life a little better on this earth. . . . 

We are the future, with help from you . . . 

And in his sweet soprano,  I've struck the answer to my question. My quest to grasp world issues, to distill cycles and events to their essence, to write audacious essays is not only worth it, it's essential. Because, as egocentric as it sounds, the change the world needs most is me.

The world needs me to nurture sons into statesmen and saints so it won't need so many soldiers.

The world needs me to build what opposition strives to break: families, friendships, future, faith.

The world needs me to produce, not simply to consume.

The world needs me to transform my home from a hermitage into a hospice---for the living as well as the dying; for foreigners as well as for family; for the body, the mind, and the spirit of every soul I can possibly reach.

The world needs me to forget myself, remember my Maker, and do as He directs---not just in the moments when the world is watching, but in every invisible choice and interaction in between. This is the change that changes the world---one heart at a time.

On Monday, I'll bustle my boy troop to the Cenotaph down our street. My husband will bugle "Last Post," and we'll struggle for two minutes of silence. We'll listen to orators recite Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" refrain, "Lest we forget." My boys will remember the fighter jet flying 500 feet overhead, but I will remember the Recessional's more forgotten second stanza:

The tumult and the shouting dies---

The Captains and the Kings depart---

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, may I remember:

I am the change the world needs most.