Last week I went downstairs to pull some meat out of our deep freeze and noticed the seal on the door was no longer working. Our deep freeze has been on its last legs for a while, so I knew this moment was coming; I just didn’t expect it to arrive at 9:45 on a Tuesday morning. The last thing I wanted to do that morning was haul a quarter of a frozen cow upstairs to my sink, simultaneously announcing my plight on Facebook in hopes that somebody would come to my rescue by offering some freezer space.

The freezer needed to be defrosted. I just kept putting it off. But when the emergency hit, I sprang into action.

Just last night I took a closer look at my kitchen counter and saw a clear sticky substance gluing down everything from the food processor to the stack of small white boards I had left on the counter. I couldn’t quite figure it out, until I opened the cabinet above and realized that the last time my daughters experimented in the kitchen, they didn’t tightly close the lid on the corn syrup. Of course, the bottle got knocked over in the cabinet and now I have a(nother) mess to deal with.

The cabinet needed to be reorganized. I kept meaning to get to it. But now that there was an emergency, I sprang into action.

I’m sensing a theme here that I really don’t want to extrapolate into my relationships with my kids; yet just yesterday, one particular daughter and I had some relational struggles. At the urging of my husband, I decided to take her out for a little one-on-one time after picking her up from choir practice. It’s in these times that we’re both removed from the triggers of everyday life that tend to set us off—we see each other’s hearts and are able to catch a better glimpse of one another’s perspective.

Living this way isn’t easy; it’s much, much easier to close the freezer door and think, “I’ll just deal with that later,” or to look at the disorganized kitchen shelf and again, close the door for another time. But if I do that with my kids, I may find one of these days that not only is the mess still there, but the meat has spoiled and there are ants in the cabinet.

I don’t want to parent out of emergency. I pray God will attune my heart to the proper daily maintenance and initiative my family requires. Oh, and if anybody knows of a good deal on a deep freeze, let me know.