Posts from for 07/17/2014
A little wit, a little struggle, a lot of Jesus
Soft
By Tresta Payne on Jul 17, 2014 08:13 am
I’m at the kitchen sink cutting flowers when she asks me to help post some pictures. She wants to sell her comforter, make room for something new and something she’s picked just for herself.
Selling her comforter is good stewardship and worth the effort, but not my effort. Not today when I’m in the middle of a thousand things, important things like cutting flowers, when the table is strewn with a year’s worth of school books and the floor is dusted with a week’s worth of dirt.
I’m irritable when things aren’t simple and rarely, very rarely, is anything ever simple with the blasted computer.
This inner conflict is welling inside me because I want to want to help. I want to be the patient mom teaching her daughter how to post a picture online and write a nice, concise description, choose a fair price, and hope for a buyer. I want to want to drop everything to help my child.
I want to do those things, but not right now.
I want to encourage my daughter for taking the initiative and trying to do this on her own, but inside I’m battling frustration. I’m fighting down words and nailing shut the doors where selfish beasts have decided they could live.
I start to say it out loud. I’m really struggling right now because I hate…I’m so frustrated by…I get so mad when we try to sell things online. I don’t want to deal with ebay and shipping and loading pictures and… And it all sounds so stupid and childish oozing out between the cracks in the door I thought was nailed tight.
The soft and gentle answers I want to give are smothered and murderously trampled by the beasts gone wild.
The flowers stand together in a jar and I hear my own heavy sighs run away, am disgusted with my own childish behavior, and force back the beasts of My Schedule and My Plans and My House – those brutes who reduce me to checking boxes.
The pictures load seamlessly, the description is short and sweet. We’ve decided Craigslist is the best option (avoid the shipping hassle, please) and in no time at all the ad is placed, and all that’s left is to hope.
Sometimes there’s work to be done on our part before the hope has room to root. The work of mothering and living and just being a kingdom-being happens so much in our hearts, where dragons are still breathing fire and no knights come to rescue, save One.
We spurn the One who comes sometimes because the way He slays dragons seems like the death of our Selves, our precious and busy Selves. We want the dragons gone, want the beasts locked away behind dungeon doors. But a beast caged is always a beast fighting to be free.
And oh how I can be the beast.
I still don’t understand the whole inner-conflict that goes on when someone else’s desires collide, headlong and head strong, with my own. I don’t understand how a woman 38 years in the making can revert so quickly to a selfish child.
Sin is a deceiver and hardener of hearts, for certain.
I take hope in the fact that I want to want to, even if I just don’t want to right now. I want to give soft answers and be a soft heart and have a soft presence, even when all is hard.
The beasts of Self and Schedule may yet live to fight another day, but victory comes in steps.
Thank you, Amanda, for daily prompts to find the groove.
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