Here’s What Needs to Happen

When you have a house and family it always seems like bad things happen in groups. I mean, obviously. Everyone knows this.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that while my husband was busy changing his car’s breaks and all that other stuff around his tires ALL WEEKEND LONG, a leak was forming in our basement and the drain to the tub was locking itself permanently so that the tub could no longer drain.

And then of course he would go back to school this week and leave me, with a negative amount of fix-it knowledge, alone. I’ve been carefully stepping around the puddles in the basement, which are conveniently located directly in front of the washer and dryer (even though they’re not the ones leaking) and trying not to smell myself or the children. I know we certainly look a sight. I can’t even bring myself to take off sweatpants because of my yucky legs.

And then of course it would be incredibly muddy this week and we would need to get seeds started and the childrens fingernails would be absolutely black.

I suppose we could just stand out in the rain….But I doubt there’s be enough water pressure to get the soap out of my long hair.

Or I could just try to fix things myself.

Or pick up and go to my parents to take a shower.

But I’m such a procrastinator. In the weirdest way possible. Like, I got up this morning when someone wet the bed and I had to change the sheets (No, it wasn’t  Roger. Or me. Or Lily), then went out in the pouring rain to take care of the chickens, came back in to cook breakfast, and did work work work all morning. In fact, I’ve been busily trying to come up with more things around the house to do just because I don’t want to have to pile everyone in the car and drive somewhere.

So I’m procrastinating about having to drive. Why in the world do I want to put that off? It’s slightly tiring getting two children ready but still…If I had another child I would probably never leave. I’d just stay here, blogging all day, like I’m doing now.

This is kind of a problem for me. Like many people, I tend to procrastinate about BIG things that need to be done and instead keep myself overly occupied with lots of little things. I have trouble really focusing on what is most important in my day to day life. My lenten sacrifice was myself. I decided to sacrifice my time and really focus on serving those in my family. No more being lazy about big or little things. But as I was listening to Father Riccardo on the radio the other day (which I often do even though I’m not Catholic because his apologetics are SO GOOD) he really called me out on my priorities.

What, he asked, are you living your life around? We all have many things that need to be done, things we have to do, but what is your purpose in doing them? Are you actively living your life, doing things daily to bring yourself closer to God? Or is God just a side thought…an “I’ll worship him once I finish….”
In short, are we living as a Mary or a Martha?

How much of my life is completely flipped? I took  my daughter out of school because I didn’t feel like that was part of how we wanted our family to be. So then how should our family be? Is it important for her to get all those little boxes checked on her online curriculum plan? Is that what we took her out of school for?

It’s so easy to allow all the little things to constantly creep up around you and choke out the BIG things. So we need to refocus. To refocus on each other and on God. Devotional time can no longer be something we’ll get around to after schoolwork. Prayer can  no longer be something we’ll do as long as we’re not too tired. It should be the first thing we do, the thing we get up to do every morning. If I really want to sacrifice myself it shouldn’t be just about what I do with my time but about what I do with myself, what my goals in life are.

This is what needs to happen. (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i[‘GoogleAnalyticsObject’]=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,’script’,’//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js’,’ga’); ga(‘create’, ‘UA-52731437-1’, ‘auto’); ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);