Abruptly you realize that:
8Your red minivan "loser-cruiser, grocery-getter" is not a Porsche.
*Staying out late is overrated and create bags under my 40 year old eyes.
*Three children sometimes feels like three too many.
*The lines at Disney are killer.
*One dog gets on my every last nerve (especially when the snow starts to melt...)
In the midst of a normal day-in-the-life of overwhelming adulthood, I yearned for a simpler time when laundry was magically done and meals were provided. (Could jail be an option?) I realized that I was a cranky, unhappy adult. I was not behaving like a loving, blessed mother and wife. Reality hit me~the grass really isn't greener on the other side~now I get it! There was something in my reality- tv life that was way outta whack...I was not loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, or full of self-control.
Much to my dismay, I figured out, it was ME! I wasn't congruent~what I believed on the inside was not what I was living on the outside! There was a gap between whom I was and whom I should be.
2 Timothy 3~describes the terrible state of the human condition:
In the last days, with strong language~consumed with self, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient, ungrateful, loveless, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, rash, conceited...having a kind of godliness, but denying its power~have nothing to do with them.
OUCH! That hurt.
Solution? Backwards design ("Understanding by Design~Wiggins and McTighe, 1998). It is an educational term, but I think it applies...(my husband is an educator, so I know many million dollar words and acronyms!) It simply means:
~BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND.
I don't want to have regrets or waste my time pining for what I do not have, not an easy task...
So, upon this new year of new beginnings, Ralph Waldo Emerson says it best:
Finish each day and be done with it
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities,
no doubt crept in;
Forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
Begin it well and serenely
And with too high a spirit
To be encumbered
With your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
