The Worst Day: How to make what's not working work for you
For whatever reason, Wednesday was the worst day.
Nothing truly tragic, just the garden variety of fatigue and frustrations, discouragement and disobedient children. It was Jeff’s day off, the day I usually take to write and study in preparation for speaking. But for whatever reason it just wasn’t working.
And we fell into the funk. Hard.
Every household probably has its own funk-patterns. For us it’s the dance of switching from Mommy’s-in-charge to Daddy’s-in-charge, handing over homeschooling hat, planning out the day with enough structure for some of us and enough freedom for the rest, with enough housework to keep from falling too far behind, but with enough rest and play to feel refreshed, constantly re-routing based on the inevitable curve balls of life, and then tossing into the mix my own indecisiveness, reluctance and lack of confidence about spending a day away from the kids.
And of course I tried to tackle it all without coffee. Never a good idea.
Of course I’m joking, but sometimes we have those days, right? The perfect storm of emotions and hormones and physical factors tossed in with a whole host of spiritual forces we cannot see, stirred up with the widely varied personalities, needs, desires, and feelings of four feeble creatures called a family.
And my good man and I looked at each other and said, “Something isn’t working.”
*Sigh* Please tell me you have those days too?
But one little paradigm shift helped us make what wasn’t working work for us (got that? ;).
One of my favorite things about The Plan (I know, it’s a diet book, stick with me here!), is how the author leads you on a complete paradigm shift about weight. Instead of emotionalism, or tying the number on the scale to our feelings of value or worth, failure or success, she leads you to treat it as data. What do I mean?
Let’s use a real-life example. Let’s say you eat a bowl of popcorn. The next day your stomach hurts, your eyes are puffy, your weight’s up 3 lbs. overnight, and you feel terrible. Instead of feeling bad, beating yourself up, and feeling discouraged, you say, “Oh. Apparently popcorn isn’t a great choice. That’s great data to apply to my daily life. I don’t think I’m going to eat that anymore because it makes me feel awful.”
You take what’s not working and make it work for you.
So Wednesday, when we were spinning our wheels and turning circles and I felt ready to blow a gasket or burst into tears, suddenly I remembered: This day is data.
Meaning: Take a look at what’s not working and make it work for you.
In real-time, this meant sitting down and praying, “Give us wisdom to see what’s not working.” It meant slowing down long enough to see. It meant thinking through our Family’s Mission Statement and evaluating our day based on what really matters. It meant me going for a walk by myself, to get the alone time my introverted soul so desperately needed. It meant making a whole new plan for the day, each of us investing quality time with one child, to get their love tanks full again. It meant me trusting that the teaching notes will get finished … another day.
(And … in the spirit of full disclosure, it meant me going to Ikea to get an under-the-bed storage bin to contain all those blasted Legos!)
It meant making a plan for next Wednesday that’s much more likely to work, because we took what wasn’t working and made it work for us.
In Colossians 1 we learned this week that prayer is supremely practical. Prayer doesn’t enable us to escape the world, but equips us to engage with it more effectively.
Prayer gives us the spiritual wisdom and understanding we need …
to make what’s not working actually work for us.
{Praying you can use the “data” of today to give you wisdom for tomorrow. Happy weekend! Thanks for reading.}
*UPDATE: The next Wednesday worked! The changes we made, based on that day’s data, were so effective. Hooray!
The hardest thing in the world
You know if something’s valuable by whether you’re willing to move everything around to make space for it.
The day Julie moved in we hauled furniture up and down the stairs. We rearranged and rearranged and rearranged the tiny bedroom she now calls home.
She’s worth it, of course!
But it was also worth moving furniture around for this tiny new item weighing less than a pound.
It was a Christmas gift, a long cylindrical package, and it had the kids crouched around in curiosity. What is it?!
Jeff and I smiled at each other, knowing.
We pulled off the wrapping and slowly unrolled, and there it was …
The world.
The kids were thrilled. We are all map-lovers and quickly began scheming furniture rearrangements in order to make wall space for this new view of the world.
The really big map already hung downstairs, in the hall (SEE HERE). This new one found a home up in the learning loft, at a height easily accessible to little eyes and tiny pointing fingers finding new frontiers. It took a lot of rearranging and we had to get rid of some less important items, but it was worth it.
Why?
Because of the world outside these walls.
Because the hardest thing in the world is to make myself care about just that–the world outside these walls.
Because I know myself and every human heart and our bent toward all things Me. And life in my middle-class American bubble can lull me to spiritual sleep and I need a daily reminder: There’s a whole world out there that God loves. And surely loving others is not so easy to hanging a map on the wall, but we do not naturally think of other cultures, other countries, other places a world away from us that need the same good news, the same love, the same hope, the same truth.
The same Jesus.
And so the same way that I love having Julie live here because she daily reminds us of a way different world than the one we’ve ever known, I love living with maps on the walls because it daily reminds me that there is so much life outside those walls and I can chill out about the insignificant irritations and petty things that plague me and I get the daily view I need so desperately:
Life outside myself.
The hardest thing in the world is to live outside ourselves. Beyond ourselves. But what about protecting our children? Yes, absolutely! Let’s protect our children from the greatest dangers–the familiars: Sin and selfishness and our heart’s natural tendency to curve in on itself a thousand ways each day.
So, do maps on the wall cure selfishness? Of course not. But our children (and us!) are shaped most by what we continually put in front of their eyes, so perhaps we can pick the marginalized instead of the movie stars, the downcast instead of the Disney channel, the poor instead of the popular. Not in a guilt-mongering, finger-wagging way, in a joyful upside-down kingdom way. Because joy comes from living outside ourselves.
And I want that joy.
{And so, in step with this, I will be returning to regular posts (1x/week) about the beautiful lives of those impacted by Gospel for Asia and World Vision. For the sake of turning our hearts continually outward, to the world God loves. I pray you’re having a blessed week. Thanks for reading.}
Setting the course for your family this year
Yes, this post is late.
My apologies. As life is a bit full at the moment, interruptions come and stuff happens and this beautiful mess of life is teeming with abundant chaotic joy. And these precious kids I have, time is so short with them! And this weather we’re having is too glorious to pass up so instead of writing this morning we took a long hike to the produce stand for a backpack full of zucchini and then munched homemade chocolate chip cookies perched in the sunshine on the sidewalk curb. There you have it. My honest confession.
Oh there is so much I want to write to you! SO much, people! The strange thing about LIFE is that when it’s full it speaks the most and when we’re up to our eyeballs in God’s glorious adventure we rarely have time to write it all down! So my apologies at the lateness and the lack and I will write more later, but for now I had promised a few people I would re-share this information on Creating a Family Mission Statement.
It’s a fun process, and when life comes hard and fast and dozens of choices present themselves each day, our mission statement centers back on the vision of what God wants for your family. So, if you haven’t yet created a Family Mission Statement (even if you a family of one!), now’s a great time. We used a fun online tool that helps you craft your own statement.
Although I never dreamed in a million years we would be living the sort of life-adventure that we are, when I look at our family mission statement … it fits. It’s a full, fun, frustrating, faith-filled adventure, and at times I wonder what on earth we’re doing, but it fits with the vision God has given us for our family.
So, what are you doing tonight? Take some time to pray, dream, draft, and use this fun online tool to draft up a Family Mission Statement. And just for fun, here is ours…
Patterson Mission Statement:
As a family we seek to glorify God by daily embodying the gospel in intentional ways: Through generosity, simplicity, faithfulness, joy, humility, grace, care, and thoughtful expressions of love.
- We will nurture our spiritual growth and love relationship with Jesus by making personal worship, prayer, and Bible times of primary importance.
- We will be careful and intentional about time commitments, guarding family evenings and date nights while inviting others freely into our lives.
- We will grow in sacrificial giving by increasing the money given away to international causes and missions while spending less on ourselves each year.
- We will take care of our bodies, souls, and spirits by staying physically fit, nourishing our bodies with real food, and carving out regular time for rest, renewal, relaxation, and recreation.
- We will seek to make every moment an opportunity to teach, shape, nurture, and inspire our children to be Christ-followers. We will seek to make the gospel attractive by living in grace, joy, and freedom. We will seek to instruct and shape their hearts rather than merely modify their behavior. We will seek to motivate them by love and grace rather than pride and fear. We will praise their obedience, humility, generosity, godly ambition and courage.
- We will measure “success” by whether our and our children’s hearts are being increasingly conformed to the image of Christ.
{Have a beautiful day. Thanks for reading.}
When you'd really like to bring her down a notch…
There seems to be one thing (and pretty much only one thing) that all of us women agree upon: Female relationships are tricky.
The whole mess begins in the beginning. In Genesis 30.
The story of Rachel and Leah, both Jacob’s wives, is to me one of the saddest in all of scripture, because it reveals so much about the brokenness and woundedness in women’s hearts. It reveals that since the first demonic whisper in the garden of Eden, we women have struggled with the lie, “You are unloved and unlovely.”
We all have a raw, gnawing desire to gain the love and approval of others. And all too often we see each other as a threat, so we compete with each other in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
In different cultures and at different times this approval and value is found in different ways so the competition will look different. Rachel and Leah were in a race to bear children because that was what earned them status and value and (they thought) the favor of their husband.
The bottom line is that they each wanted to be the beloved. In our culture, obviously it’s different. I can honestly say I’ve never been tempted to try to bear more children than someone else.
But I may compete for approval. For status. For the regard or praise of others.
And the desire is still the same. When I do that, I’m operating under the exact same assumptions that Rachel and Leah did–it looks different, but the motive is the same:
If I can outdo those around me, then I will be the beloved.
We have to be on guard, girls. The enemy does not want us to love each other. Nothing makes Satan more pleased than when we view each other as opponents rather than sisters. The moment we begin wanting to bring someone else down a notch is the moment we know we’ve been sucked into the demonic game of competition. And you know what that reveals?
We just so desperately want to be the beloved. We want, somehow, to shine. And our motives are mixed. We long for love and favor (good), but it’s as if we think there is a limited amount in the world so we must steal it from others in order for us to be full.
There is no limited amount.
God has plenty of love and favor for us all. See, the problem for Rachel and Leah was that there was limited favor. They had one husband for two women, which is not God’s design. They, in many ways, were doomed from the start. But we have no such disadvantage. God’s love for us is boundless and there is plenty of His affection and favor for us all.
There is room for all of us in this world.
You can flourish, I can flourish.
We don’t have to compete for God’s love.
My prayer for us is that we, as women, would experience the love of God in such a full and overflowing manner, that there is room in our hearts to wholeheartedly cheer for others. To wish for their best. To be 100% freed from envy and jealousy. To rejoice when others are preferred above us or when others succeed where we struggle.
We have to.
The story of Rachel and Leah is a tragic one. I’m sure their household was miserable. It reeked of envy and jealousy, it teemed with distrust and dishonesty. There was no love. For two women who were probably wonderful friends at one time, the poison of competition likely destroyed whatever love they had shared.
Thank goodness we don’t all share a husband, amen?
And the Heavenly Husband we do share has plenty of love for us all.
In what way have you caught yourself competing with another woman? Wanting to bring her down a notch? What does it reveal about your need to feel love and approval? What steps can you take to STOP and choose to love instead? Thanks for reading.