Backwards Design

I remember being a child and idealizing adulthood.  "When I grow up...I will...drive a Porsche...or stay out as late as I want...or have 20 children...go to Disney every year...or have ten puppies..."

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