A little over a week ago, my family returned from an intense and wonderful ten day trip to New Mexico for my beautiful sister-in-law's wedding. Although we enjoyed the trip immensely, I only in the past couple of days feel slightly normal, energized, and back to the old routine, or something like a routine of course. The first few days, my exhaustion manifested itself in an ugly attitude of frustration with every part of parenting that is unpredictable, helplessness with my lot in life as a stay at home mom, and sometimes even a bitterness in my attitude towards God for not complying with the ways I thought He should be working in my life. Throughout these struggles, I needed to keep reminding myself: all is not wrong with the world! I am just tired. What a dark outlook fatigue can cause! Thankfully I was able to sleep a little extra, and I was able to approach the Lord in prayer with renewed energy and freshness of mind. God is so faithful.
One of the things I had been frustrated about was my request that God make me better, make me a holier person. To me that means God providing something like a 12 week program to holiness, a spiritual bootcamp if you will, some kind of lesson plans or directions that I just have to follow step by step in order to become St. Therese. I kept praying that God would give me something to say yes to, and then I waited for my holiness packet to come in the mail, or something like that. When it didn't, that combined with such tiredness and a drowsy spirit led me into some confusion and slight spiritual turmoil, or maybe a little worse than slight.
If you have read my blog before, you might understand that I have a love/hate relationship with A Mother's Rule by Holly Pierlot. It is a wonderful book about order and discipline and routine in such a way that our lives are able to be more contemplative and we are more easily able to invite God into every action. I have bitterly muttered under my breath on multiple occasions that Holly Pierlot must not be a real person, or a real mom at least, or else she at least had perfectly predictable babies who napped and nursed on schedule without fail. I am sure this is not true, but it is easier to blame someone I don't know for my life problems than to blame myself, who has not even been very diligent at my own mother's rule in the first place.
As I sat and prayed one afternoon this week, listening with agitation to my baby fuss after sleeping only a half hour and hoping he would go back to sleep, I felt like the Holy Spirit was finally revealing His request to me for a "yes." Though I had wanted something steady and planned and predictable to say yes to, my own version of do it yourself "become the perfect Catholic" set with planned prayer times and daily Masses and evening prayers that don't get interrupted, He was asking me to say yes immediately and always to the immediate, to every moment Christ presents me with in the best way possible. My son cried, too early in my opinion, and he sleeps in a way that makes me feel out of control. God was asking me to say yes to that, to say yes to being out of control! To say yes to letting go of control. To say yes to giving God control and to say yes to that daily manifestation of roadblocks in my simplest of plans. This is God's holiness program for me, saying yes to what He presents to me every day.
I am not saying that I should just go with the flow and not seek to grow in diligence and routine in a way that serves my family, just as the captain of a ship does not throw out the compass and map just because he has to move around an iceberg. My goal is to keep trying to build good habits of order, while still letting the Holy Spirit lead in all of the ways that He permits my circumstances to be what I planned and in all of the ways He permits them to be different from what I expected. It goes beyond not complaining into a repeated yes, yes, yes. It's funny as I write this, because it is so familiar, something I've already known and been convicted of over and over. Thankfully God is so patient with me and willing to convict me again and again by letting me hear Him in a new way.
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