Yesterday I was switching my wet clothes into the dryer when my arm knocked over a nearly empty and very grimy jug of liquid detergent head first into the washer. I imagined the last flow of soap pouring onto my clothes and getting them soapy again, and if not that, then all that nasty dirt and lint and germs on the plastic jug shaking off onto my clean clothes and ruining my flow of laundry loads. Meanwhile a really nice blouse that needed to be line dried fell off onto the dirty garage floor. I flipped out. Fortunately, only my dad could hear my raised, panicked, frustrated, stressed out voice, and he didn't come running to see what was wrong. I headed into the house, my shoulder muscles tingling tensely, and washed my hands. (Fyi, my laundry was fine.)
It reminded me of Friday. Sometimes as a teacher you can either let students alone and throw the grades up in the air and see where they land, or you can work superbly hard to try to try to try to try to try (sound like a broken record yet?) to get a student to thiiiiiiiink and learrrrrrrn (insert my whining voice and whimpering). And some days at the end of a long week where one of our staff quits and unintentionally leaves the rest of us hanging, I hold my head in my hands and want to tell everyone to just please stop, just stop talking and raise your hand first please! (Ok, I think I actually did that.)
I'm learning a lot about myself via teaching. One of which is I don't know how I could be a homeschool parent. Or a mother. Like, I don't know how I could parent well and sanely and with patience and kindness because mothers don't have evenings and weekends off. And little people require a lot of calmness. And control. And patience. And not freaking out over dropped laundry and toppled detergent.
So yesterday evening I was driving down the road thinking about my singleness (snort) and after reviewing the last two days performance thought, "Well, maybe God is waiting until I can't have kids anymore to bring me a husband because He knows I wouldn't do well with kids."
Eeeerrrrrt! Stop! Reverse.
No. That is a pity party. That is not truth. The truth is I want kids. Always have. The falsehood is that God will not give that to me because I'm not good enough. The truth is that God's grace is sufficient, and if He chooses or does not choose to give me children of my own to raise then He will supernaturally give me the power to face every day in a way that glorifies Him regardless of my own ability.
I find pity parties sometimes come very slyly upon me. They come in the form of resigning myself to something that I don't need to resign myself to simply to erect a wall of identity behind which to hide and lick my wounds. "Yeah, I would probably make a mess of it anyway, so it's just as well." Translation? I want xyz, and I'm hurting right now, so I'm just going to say that I'm a horrible person (or not pretty enough or funny enough or too brash or too confusing anyway) and pretend that it's all okay when it's not.
Reversing the pity party can be painful, but I would rather live in the light of truth than behind a wall of excuses.
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