Finding Joy

Gooey mouths, sticky floors, and a million golden moments. It hasn't made sense to write a blog post when I am filling my time with caring for my family, and my spare moments are those in which I collapse into exhaustion. This is the first time, I've picked up my laptop to write in ages, and I guess it says something about where I am at least this week. I have a little bit of time, or theoretically a little bit of emotional energy to give this a try. But like a muscle that has atrophied through neglect, the part of my brain that could write a 5-page college paper in three hours and get an A has come under disrepair. I hardly remember how to communicate this way. Can you make sense of my ramblings?

I'd like to share something that is on my heart today. As I prepare for our fall baby to arrive, I think of all the demands that go with homemaking. I really struggle a lot with my own expectations of myself, comparison, and idolizing rest and relaxation.

It's so sneaky how the enemy uses the very things we are wired to enjoy as a tool to take us away from God. Because we know that rest is part of God's design. While a sabbath is anything but unbiblical, it becomes an idol when rest becomes our end all, be all goal.

Today it was so clear to me that it is. My goal from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I hit my pillow at night is to make myself happy, and that goal typically involves a lot of relaxation and leisure. You wouldn't think so to look at me because I work fairly hard, and don't often rest. In fact, I can run myself ragged quite easily, feeling like my beautiful home will fall apart if I take a break. (My other idol.) The enemy is so sneaky, isn't he? He tantalizes my heart with two polar opposite idols and has me ping-ponging back and forth between running myself ragged to keep my home up to a certain standard that I've idolized, while simultaneously causing me to idolize the concept of rest and leisure.

I got an hour behind on my perfectly curated schedule today. Oh, and I also learned that the library in our home that I just reorganized was going to get overhauled by my husband's new books coming our way. Every time I reorganize and make things look nice, my husband immediately throws his stuff in the space, so that it looks worse than when I started, and I lose the room for my things. I was in tears today. Pregnancy hormones? Probably. But was that all? Hardly. When I lose my cool and get worked up (thankfully on fewer and fewer moments as Christ sanctifies me and teaches me my limits) it gives me a barometer to tell me my focus is out of whack. What is going on here? Why am I freaking out because my schedule has gotten reworked? Why am I angry crying and feeling sorry for myself that my husband is going to clutter the now perfect library?

Could it be that I have lost my perspective on what God has called me to be doing with my time? Could it be that an idol is in the way of my heart's cry to worship Him and only Him more than all else? I wonder something... could it be that -

When I wake up in the morning, if my goal is to serve and bless my family and anyone else God has placed in my life that day maybe I wouldn't be chagrined when my agenda to rest gets thrown off. Maybe I wouldn't feel like a failure when my vision for a curated, perfect home doesn't come to fruition.

Maybe I'd stop seeing my husband entering the kitchen after work as an inconvenience, as a disrupter of my peace. Maybe the late nights with a toddler would be a little valuable, especially when they end with me rocking her gently as she clutches her new grey bunny. Cheek pressed against my chest and chubby hands resting secure under her chin.

Maybe the things my husband does to help me would feel even more valuable because they would be the bonuses that make serving him and others easier instead of a drop in the bucket of my ever-insatiable hunger for more "me time."

Maybe my perspective would change.

Maybe I would experience

Joy.

Maybe you would too.