When His plans are not our plans...

We started summer with a bang this year, quite literally.  Some might recall that my "word" for the year is "imperfect," as I wanted to try to learn to live life more contentedly in the here and now.  I've spent so much time feeling like I couldn't be happy until life met my standard of perfect, and it felt like a good year to try to work on finding happiness NOW, in the imperfect.  I don't mean giving up on striving for holiness, but rather giving up the need for the perfect house, the perfectly clean house, the perfectly behaved children, the perfect relationships, etc.  Allowing those around me to be human, allowing my life to have ups and downs, and trying to see the beauty even when things don't "go my way."

Well, in my experience, God tends to provide me with ample "practice time" anytime I decide I'm going to work on a particular character flaw, and this year has been no exception.  As I mentioned, my husband was laid off in January of this year - imperfection.  When he finally did find a job in April, it wasn't at all what he or I were hoping for - imperfection.  And then.. just as summer finally arrived, we were out running an errand in our ordinary life, when BAM, everything changed in an instant.   Suddenly our only car was totaled, and while thanks be to God my kids and husband were perfectly OK, I found myself with two broken bones in my pelvis and a broken hip.  Imperfection!  Not at all how I had planned to spend my summer.  I had grand plans to run a 10k, not to spend weeks trying to ambulate from couch to bathroom with a walker.  But "my plans are not your plans..."

And yet, and yet.  In this imperfect situation, I've gotten to see more of my mom than I had in years.  In this imperfect time, my cousin quite miraculously came home from abroad (the very day before our accident), with free time to spare, meaning she was available to take care of my kids and household, and that we, too, could have more time together than in the past several years.  In the uncertainty and pain of this imperfect moment, I have seen the depths of the care and friendships that surround me, as people have provided meals and assistance beyond what we could have imagined.  It's not what I had planned, and it's still hard for me to say that it's "better" than what I had planned (who wants broken bones, after all!) but it's amazing how God can take something so bitter and bring sweetness out of it.

Still, I need to ask for your prayers, my blog followers... for swift healing, and for the tide of our life to reverse direction, as it were.  We are so thankful for the lessons God has been teaching us during in this time, but we are at the same time feeling pretty discouraged (never have I so identified with the book of Job as this year).  In particular, prayers for my husband's job situation to improve would be MOST appreciated!  In this imperfection, I have definitely appreciated more deeply than ever his character, to go off to work in the wee hours of the morning (he's at work two hours before the kids or I get up) day after day in the hot sun or the pouring rain to a job that is so much less than what he deserves.  He does it because he loves us, and I love him for it, but I so want to see him happy and fulfilled in his work!  So would you keep him (and us) in your prayers?

There is beauty in the imperfect, yes... part of that beauty, as I am learning, is realizing how much we are made for MORE, we are made to be perfect, we are made for a heaven that will answer all these longings.   When life becomes an exercise in embracing ever deeper levels of imperfection, there is no temptation to mistake this life for our ultimate end, and for that lesson, I am truly grateful.

All the same, say thank you to God today for the ability to walk... we never appreciate the blessings of the ordinary until we don't have them.  Like the ability to put on your own pants, to get into a shower yourself, and to carry a cup of tea from one room to the other.  I'm so thankful, now, for the blessing of empathizing with the pain of the handicapped, the home-bound, the suffering; this experience is (hopefully?) very temporary for me, yet there are so many for whom such situations are a permanent cross.  So say thank you for your mobility, and pray for those who lack it!

And if YOUR life feels imperfect today, read 1 Corinthians chapter 2.  That and the book of Job have brought me much consolation during these trials....

Catching up!

Wow.  It has been a long time since I had time to write.  I thought I was busy with one little, but two really keeps me hopping in a different way!  Plus, life just keeps GOING.  Things change, and we add in new goals and new challenges and new things to spend time on, all the while other things (like this blog) have to take a temporary or permanent backseat.

However, I've decided that an occasional shout into the void is better than nothing, and that in order to make that happen, I have to be less concerned about writing in a polished fashion, and just start, for the time being, with putting something out there.

So without further ado, a quick catch up of happenings since last June:

1) We spent most of the month of July dealing with a flooded basement.  Not fun times.  But since my "word" for last year was Flow, as in, going with the flow, it was a curiously appropriate challenge to go through.

2) We signed up for a vegetable CSA last year (summer, and then again in winter) and have LOVED having so many fresh veggies coming into the house.  It has really helped my cooking skills, too, and I am slowly learning to cook more creatively with what I have on hand, and less from recipes or grand plans for each week.

3) Our baby boy, who still needs a blog name (leaving that for another day!), turned one a couple of weeks ago.  It doesn't seem possible that a year has gone by since his birth!  The first year of my daughter's life seemed so interminably long, and I expected to go back to that sort of hazy baby mode... well, we did for maybe six weeks, and then it was right back to life as usual, plus one.  Fortunately our little guy is such a mellow, go with the flow sort of tyke that it didn't seem like a big hassle to just bring him along on all our adventures.

4) I officially became a full time stay-at-home mom in November, when the company I'd been working for since before I got married laid off over half its staff.  I was probably the only person getting the news that day who was actually really happy at the news!  My husband and I had been talking for months about the need to get me out of my job, because of the stress it was putting on all of us.  My daughter, in particular, was struggling with getting less attention because of having to share me with her brother, and having me unavailable an extra 10 hours per week just wasn't working.  The turn around in her behavior since then (which is probably also from me being less stressed, as well as just growing older, adjusting to changes, etc) has really been remarkable.

5) I picked the word Imperfect this year for what I want to work on, pray on, etc.  I realized over the last several months that I often let the perfect be the enemy of the good, in that I have a hard time letting things go at good enough.  Sometimes that is a good thing, but when it comes to housework vs spending time with the kids, it's something I really need to work on.  I also have a hard time staying joyful if I feel like everything isn't done, or isn't just the way I want it, so when there are worries, or stresses, or concerns over the present or the future, joy just seems to go out the window.  Trying hard to be aware of this tendency this year, and to pray on it, and work on it.

6) Just as He sent lots of "opportunities" for me to *practice* going with the Flow last year, God started this year off with a big bang of an opportunity to practice being joyful even during imperfect times.  My husband was laid off from his job in the middle of January, which as you can imagine isn't a great thing with me not working and us having a mortgage and two little kids to feed.  It's been a long six weeks since then, but I can say with great confidence that God really is trying to teach us patience, hope, and faith through the experience... I am finding that faith really truly does act like a muscle, and my faith muscle had grown a bit weak and atrophied.  This experience is making me exercise it every single day.  It's an act of the will to have faith in the face of no obvious guarantees, and no obvious signs of things changing any time soon.  However, early on I decided that it is better to wait well than to wait poorly, and it is better to wait with faith than without.  I have the sense deep down that this is an important lesson to learn at this time in my life, because I know that as my husband, my parents, my kids, and myself all grow older, there are going to be many more times of living in uncertainties, living in less than perfect circumstances, and it would be wise to learn NOW how to wait in hope and faith despite external circumstances.

7) When I get down these days, these verses help (and I hope that, if there is anyone out there who is similarly struggling to keep on keeping on in faith, they will help you too):

James 2, 3-4  "the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything."

Romans 5 3-5 "because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us."

I'm learning these verses, not just in word, but also in truth: it is TRUE that suffering does produce perseverance, if we continually turn to God for it.  I imagine myself like Peter, trying to walk on the waves...

8)  And in the meantime, we're trying to live this temporary situation as a "good".  After all, there won't be many times in our life, at least in the foreseeable future, when my husband will have this much time home with us!  It is tough trying to balance the financial reality, i.e. that we really can't spend "extra", with how we'd like this time to be, if it were really a vacation.  But we're finding low cost and free things to do that are special, just the same.

9) On a different note, we finally switched to ALL cloth diapers for my little guy.  We did cloth with my daughter from about 1 to potty training, but used disposables at night.  She could go all night in a single disposable, and I hated having to wake up to change her, as I needed to if we used cloth overnight, so I went the easy route with her.  Then with my son, we just never questioned it; we started using BG 4.0 pockets from around a month of age with him, but kept up with the disposables overnight.  Then, literally last week, we ran out of disposables, and I thought, "hey, we always have to change him in the middle of the night anyway.  Why don't we just TRY cloth overnight again?"  He would leak out of disposables in the middle of the night if I didn't change him, sometimes even if I did, so we were going through two a night, and then since they were in the house, we tended to use them for trips out, or when we didn't feel like stuffing a diaper.  Well, miracle of miracles, I've found that a) he doesn't leak out at ALL with the cloth! and b) even though we were "only" using disposables overnight, we were still going through a box a month, and will likely save at least $250 between now and potty training by switching fully to cloth.  So glad that it's finally working for us.

10) On that note, it's time to get ready for bed.  I do hope, but can't promise, to be able to write more often!  I really miss having the opportunity and reason to stretch my writing muscles, so I do need to make time for real writing again, even while my main focus has to remain firmly on my little "living epistles".

A gratuitous shot of me and my snugglebug to leave you with:

Oh, I just love my kiddos so much ;)  It may be an imperfect life... but they remind me of just how HAPPY imperfection can be.

Peace be with you all - and if you read this, and can spare a moment, please do say a prayer that my husband will soon find a job!