"Do You Know How Much I Love You?"

I am not a hugger. But I want to hug my children more. So, I devised a plan. 

Every night, instead of giving each child a peck on the cheek and a quick, "I love you", I now take the time to ask,

"Do you know how much I love you?"

Then after the child asks "How much?", I say, "This much!" and I wrap my arms around my child and give him or her a tight squeeze.

The biggest surprise for me is that my new bedtime routine has taken off with my middle son. After I squeeze the breath out of him, he always pauses, thinks, then answers with, "Hmmm… that half-way counts" or "Ummm… that kind-of counts". Then I have to squeeze him again, faking the strain of hugging him so tight that my muscles want to burst. 

He almost always still says, "Kind-of, Mom."

But then, it's HIS turn. "Do you how much I love YOU?"

"How much?" I ask.

"This much!" he replies. And he wraps his skinny arms around me and hugs me as hard as his little body allows him. Then he kisses me. So sweet.

And this is my rough-around-the-edges boy. My boy who knows how to push all my buttons. My boy who will argue with me over ANYTHING, just for the sake of arguing.

Now every night– no matter how many times I had to discipline during the day– every night, he wants to show me how much he loves me.

And when he tells me that my hug is "half-way", I have an answer for him. I say,

"It's because I love you SO MUCH that I can't show you how much I love you. I can only show you half of it."

"Really?" he asks with a skeptical, side-ways look.

"Really," I answer as convincingly as I can.

It may be years, even decades before my son is able to fully grasp his mother's love for him. In the meantime, I'll just have to keep squeezing him with all my might.

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I was going to end my post there, but I felt that I had to add this:

When God shows us how much He loves us, don't we sometimes tell Him, "Ummm… that kind-of counts, God"? Maybe we had our eyes set on something and God didn't give it to us, maybe we're experiencing too much pain at the time, maybe we just can't see the bigger picture… yet. It may be years, or even decades, before we are able to grasp just how much God loves us.