Childlike Behavior

Joy like a child.

Right now, my daughter and I are at the pool, enjoying the beginning days of summer break. She is playing in the sprayarea and I am relaxing in a chair.

“Mommy! Watch!” she screams as she flies down the little slide. She will go down this slide over and over again until I have to bribe her with ice cream so that we can go home. She plays for hours (as long as it’s something she’s interested in) laughing, screaming, singing, talking to imaginary characters in her own little world.

When do we lose that? That carefree, joyous, play in the mud, make believe play time? What would happen if everyday at work, for one hour everyone had to stop working and just…play? No electronics. Just Legos and Barbie, cardboard boxes, little watercolor sets, squirt guns and water balloons. Better yet, everyday an hour of required playground time. Could you picture business suits going down slides and women going across the monkey bars?

Let’s try this challenge: for one month each day, for just five minutes, you have to play like a child. Run around your house and play tag. Show up at a playground and ignore the bewildered looks of children as you speed to the swings and fly like Superman. Dump out your old box of Legos (don’t lie…you know you kept them) and just build something.

Seriously. Let’s do this.

Gotta go. My six-year-old wants me to be the shark in the water. Game on.

Worrying Through The Storms

Worry.

Such a simple word and, yet, there are mountains of emotions behind this five-letter word. Anxiety, panic, depression leading to insomnia, weight loss or weight gain, heart problems, migraines. We lash out or draw inward. We cry or are silent. Our heads hurt, some of us feel nauseated or even vomit. Many of us run from it, either to someone else or into something, hoping we can forget what we’re running from. Families begin to lose each other, fall, and the lines of love become broken until there is nothing left except for anger and hurt.

All because of this one word.

Worry.

What worries you? I can tell you what worries me. Finances. I am always worried about finances. I keep a spreadsheet of what comes in, calculate bills and savings so I know exactly what goes out. To. The. Penny. The problem is I know so much about the comings and goings of our finances that that little, tiny word starts to bud in the back of my brain while I am calculating, punching numbers, predicting what will happen if this is not paid by a certain date.

Worry.

Worry that we will fall so far behind in our debt that we will die as slaves to all these companies we owe. Worry that we will never pay back someone who so generously loaned us money. Worry that we will never financially reach the finish line to our embryo adoption and that we will not be able to save a tiny, frozen life just because we couldn’t afford it.

But really when you get down to the root of all this horrible worrying, and you really think about what is causing this worry, the storm clears and you see the sunlight poking through.

Worry is just another disguise of our unwillingness to let God be in control.

I am truly not worried about our finances. No. If I am honest with myself, I will confess that I am stubbornly not handing even our finances to God. The same God who cleared out a road in the middle of the Red Sea for His people, the same God who brought fire down from the sky and set a heavily-watered sacrifice ablaze to prove that He is God. But apparently He is not good enough to be in charge of something so insignificant as money. Why can’t I let my worries go? Why can’t I just let Him be in control? How much more I could sleep at night if I just handed Him my spreadsheet and say “I don’t know how You are going to pull this off, but I know You are going to do something amazing with it!”

As I am typing this, we are going through another round of storms. The basement is flooding and water is coming in through the walls. I just got off the phone with the insurance company and it won’t be covered but I thought hey, couldn’t hurt to try. As I was speaking with the rep, she commented on how well I am taking it, the flooding and damage. That made me pause. Why was I able to watch the water come pouring in and calmy speak with the woman on the phone? Tears were in the back of my throat but I was still able to keep it light-hearted. A voice drifted into my consciousness. “It could be worse.” Yes, it could definitely be worse. We could be watching as a tornado is ripping our house from above our heads, as some people may be experiencing right now. The water leaking in could be up to our necks, like many have reported during floods. We could be so financially destroyed that we lose everything and live in a shelter, as so many families are forced to do.

Really, all those things could still happen to us.

But worrying isn’t going to stop that from happening. Letting God take control of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, will melt away all those gut-sucking emotions that drain our souls. Remember the prophet who was homeless and relied on the food dropped to him from crows? He didn’t have a spreadsheet of his finances and felt sweat drip from his back when he realized he might be two cents short of paying his cellphone bill.

Another storm is about to begin and bring more rain with it. And while I get out the shop vac again and suck up all the water and dump it into bucket after bucket I have two choices. I can worry about all the damage that is going to happen and make it harder to sell our home in twenty years. Or I can just reflect on how blessed we are to have a home to suck up water from the walls. Because worrying about it is only going to raise my blood pressure. And double the amount of chocolate I am going to devour.

Summer of Sabbath

As a teacher, I love summers. We take a well-deserved break from a hectic schedule, grading mountains of tests and daily work, meetings, and managing the behaviors of dozens of students. But I also dread summers. It’s not because of being home full-time with my daughter. In fact, spending that much needed time with her is what I look forward to the most. It’s the lack of routine. After nine months of running at 4:30 in the morning, clean, work, grade, plan, my daughter’s dance class, Awana and Bible study, clean, dinner, read, bed, repeat. It’s an exhausting schedule and the summer gives me a few months to rest before jumping back into that schedule. But this schedule also keeps me in check. The routines hold me accountable in my daily readings of the Word, keeping myself healthy, earning a paycheck and building relationships with students and co-workers, and providing structure for my six-year-old. I know I can set my own routines during the summer and I can stick to them but it’s easier to think “eh, I don’t have to do this today.” After a few days of nothing on my schedule, I find myself sitting on the porch feeling like an unmolded, lump of flesh. That’s when I know I absolutely have to give myself goals. I sign my daughter and myself up for a summer reading program at the library, I tutor, plan to run an event to encourage myself to continue working out, set a goal for each day, and invite people over to the house to motivate myself to clean. We plan road trips, camping trips, visits with parents and in-laws. We have a dog now and this furry boy forces us to stay on our toes. If we don’t keep him active, he destroys the house. But I still want to reserve Sundays for rest, worshipping God and fellowshipping with my family and friends. It’s such a fine line, isn’t it? God wants us to work. He designed our bodies for work and service. We were not meant to watch TV or play on our phones all day. We were built to provide for our families and to help others, to work hard and finish the day knowing we did what God wants us to do. But God also provided a day for us to rest from work, to trust Him to provide for our needs during that rest. Just as God provided enough manna for the Israelites before the Sabbath so that gathering on the seventh day was not necessary (or allowed), God provides us with what we need on our day of rest. Even during the summer, God wants me to work. This work would be more about service for my family than earning a wage but it is something that He requires of me. Which is probably why I feel so restless after just a couple of days of nothing. If I don’t do something, the summer is gone in a flash and I will walk into my classroom on the first day of school feeling as if I have completely wasted my summer. And we all know that there is nothing worse than having a teacher who is way too eager to get to work.

Seeing Red

I had a scary moment today. I went to type in my username and password in this blog’s website. But what showed up on my screen was the word ‘invalid.’ I tried typing in password after password but the same word showed up on my screen. My panic level began to rise. Did someone hack into my account? I just started this blog! Then I could start feeling the anger begin to rear its ugly head. Are you kidding me? I’m new to this whole blogging thing! Why would someone do this? Turns out, I just had typed one letter as a capital letter when the original had all lower case letters. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a public breakdown. That would have been embarrassing. This over dramatic experience got me thinking. How many times is my first reaction to hit the angry red button? I see red when I see facial hair trimmings left on the bathroom sink. I yell when I step on a toy for the 20th time in one morning. My eyes roll around in my head like marbles when someone cuts in front of me in the checkout lane. Steam comes out of my ears when I see that a bird has used my van for target training practice right after the car wash. Why is my first reaction an out of control, scary monster that comes crawling out of my depths with a roar? My paramount conclusion: sin. Yep, sin. Sin is actually a natural response because sin is part of our DNA. Society wants us to think that our first response is the correct one. According to the rest of the world, it’s okay to yell at someone who cuts us off in the turn lane. We should be allowed to be upset when things don’t go as planned. I will be the first one in line to tell you I am just as guilty of living this lifestyle. But hitting the pause button is not natural. It’s supernatural. It requires a divine intervention. It is not normal to have a pleasant conversation with someone who has taken the last milk off the shelf. If we are to be the ” light of the world,” we are to be a comfort and show restraint on our out of control emotions. This is difficult to do if we come roaring in like a tornado, wreaking havoc and causing destruction. How on Earth do we do this? That’s just it. We can’t succeed at this if we consider ourselves a part of this world. We have to separate ourselves from what society says is normal and seek the lifestyle that is laid out by God. We are not perfect. We make mistakes. But if we allow God to train us to press the pause button first, we can show the world our loving God. We can show others that we are not of this world, we are unnatural. This is an abnormal lifestyle, a movement that made the disciples look weird. Let’s join together and be a part of this odd society of calm, gentle people.  I never liked being normal anyway.

Birthing Pains

I am new to this blogging thing. I usually pride myself on being technical savvy until I actually try to do something technical then I realize I didn’t really know much about it. So forgive this old fogey as she tries to figure it out. The directions in the “easy how-to” box said to use your first post to describe why you are writing a blog. I had to wait until the next day to write because I wanted to do some serious thinking. I woke up this morning ready to write something earth-shifting. Instead, I’m sitting here with my coffee thinking “I get to drink coffee slowly because there’s no school today and my child is still sound asleep.” Life is good. God is good. Hey, that sounds like a good start. My blog is about life: life as a parent, life as a wife, life as a teacher, life as a child of God. Life is good but it can also be tough. God doesn’t want us to go it alone. He wants us to live life together, laugh together, cry together, and just be together. After watching our friend Sam survive almost two months in the wilderness by himself in the show called “Alone,” it has never been more apparent to me that God did not design man (and woman) to be alone. He wants us to fellowship together. And that is my reason for writing this blog. To bring us together in this crazy, get-me-off-this-ride-Im-going-to-be-sick world through this weird thing called a blog. If there’s spelling errors, I apologize. I haven’t figured out how to move to another screen to use the Miriam-Webster website. My husband says to toggle. Whatever that means.