Lessons from the Construction Zone {This Day Thursday: Perspective}

You may have seen me mention it on my Facebook page. The construction. Here’s an update- it looks good. And it’s still going.

The good news is that I am done waiting for the place to get to normal because that ain’t gonna 

happen for a while. I’m going to write anyway.

So here you go, lovely readers. A few lessons I’ve learned in the construction zone…

1. Not every interruption is an inconvenience- when people walk directly into our lives and start banging things around and making noise, our first instinct is to scream:  “inconvenient!!!” That does two things-it blinds you to any purpose that person may hold in your life and it makes you super ungrateful. Both of which make you pretty miserable and pretty miserable to be around. So before you play the "inconvenient" card, take stock of what is going on in your life right now determine if that is a fair assessment. Most times, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not. And it does a lot for your sanity to admit that.

2. It doesn’t help to just shuffle your baggage around- you need to clear it out. I was lamenting our closets the other day. I tried to put things in them, things that were currently homeless at the hand of our construction, and I found that the closets had no vacancy. I told my husband that this didn’t make sense- I’m a purger. At least once a month I go on a rampage and start filling boxes with stuff to give away and stuff to throw away. Therefore, it would stand to reason that we had a bit of closet space in which to hide the homeless stuff.

My husband reminded me that while it looks like we are getting rid of stuff, the majority of it is just being shuffled around. And that won’t do. 

Sometimes you just need to grab the heavy boxes of all the junk you’ve been accumulating and kick it to the curb. 

Other times, you need to gather up all those excess blessings you’ve been grasping and pass them around. Sometimes the baggage-what we receive from it- can bless others. It may look like a mess, but it gives clarity or comfort to our neighbor- so look for those who would benefit, make sure they want to benefit, then give it away.

3. Your house is a pigsty- so is everyone else’s. This is perhaps my most difficult lesson. I think I tried at the beginning of construction to hold up the façade of a well-run household. But here’s the truth- I’m no maid. As much as I would love to have one, that is not in the realm of our financial reality. So I make due. Also, I don’t like to clean. I do it. I tolerate it. 

Cleaning, cooking, laundry, maintenance, shopping- all are necessary to run a perfect home, but I’m not sure the desire to do every one of those things lies within a single person. And that doesn’t even include the parenting. Maybe that means that you ask for help. Maybe that means that you and your friends work out a deal that you cook for them for the rest of their lives and they in turn clean your house. Not that I''ve ever made that deal...

So the real lesson is that you don't have to do it all. Well, maybe you do, but you don't have to feel like a failure because the laundry is sitting clean in baskets on the couch. Or the kids' shoes are everywhere except where they belong. Or that your family members refuse to wash the toothpaste spit out of the sink when they are brushing their teeth. (Just be glad they brushed.)

You need people and that's ok. No one has it all together. No one.

And to anyone who thinks I wrote these points for my own benefit:bingo.

There you have it- a glimpse into our world at present. And at this point it is far less dangerous to visit our world through words on a screen, let me assure you.

Pray for me as the funstruction continues and I will pray for you too. Deal? Good.