Confidence Has Its Limits

One of the devotional pieces I have added to my life this year is an app based on The Confident Woman by Joyce Meyer. In the devotional for February 9th, she wrote this:

"Trial and error is the road to success, and you can't drive that road as long as your car is parked. So get moving, and God will direct you. When people are confident, they try things, and they keep trying until they find a way to be successful in what God has called them to do."

I guess that means I am usually confident. I am always trying (and failing) things. Something doesn't work in my lesson plan? I try something new. I re-order the rooms in our house several times a year hoping a new system will make things work better. I've had several different schedule/planner systems that have worked, but I'm always up for trying something new.

Every once in a while, though, I hit a wall. I feel so overwhelmed by something that I shut down almost completely. I can't make decisions and have a hard time motivating myself to do anything. This happened last weekend. We had a snow day from school, my son had a friend over and my husband was working from home. This seemed like the perfect time to dive into my latest cleaning project, the office/craft room. This is the catch all room in our house for things that don't have a home. It tends to get over cluttered very quickly.

In my head I had already decided that I was going to get rid of a good amount of craft supplies that I'm not using and turn them into craft baskets for our school's auction in April. I easily have a four inch stack of beautiful papers as well as embellishments and fabric and other things that are in great shape but need a new home.

But there's just so much - my intentions and ideas are bigger than my schedule or my space. I see something and think, "I can make something with that!" and I buy it and then it sits.

I pulled all the craft materials out and spread them on our bed. Soon I had to move some piles to the living room because the bed was full and I was afraid it would collapse under the weight. I made some decisions about things I wanted to keep and how I wanted to order things. I emptied file cabinets and moved things around so I could get to the things we need more often. Then I hit the wall, figuratively speaking. I couldn't will myself out of the chair. I had to ask my husband what to do with this pile or that because I just couldn't make another decision. The only thing that eventually got me back to work was the idea that I would have to sleep on the floor because our bed was unavailable and the boys wouldn't share the new couch.

By Saturday, I was calling the office The Pit of Dispair. All my good intentions and motivation for making the office usable again was gone.

Honestly, it does look better. There's less clutter on the floor, there's a drawer and a half empty in a file cabinet. Pictures are consolidated rather than scattered. But another day or two of work is still necessary. But that will not happen any time soon. I need a break. I made the office tolerable and moved things off the bed and couch so we can move around freely, but that's as far as I'm willing to go for now.

Hopefully my confidence will replenish after a few days' rest.

Making Peace at Home

I have this love/hate relationship with my house. It's small, but it's ours. It doesn't take much, though, to get me started on a list of its flaws.

My husband developed the flu at the first of the year (the kind of flu NOT covered by the shot), so my son and I waged war on the germs by cleaning the house from top to bottom. I was thrilled with how clean things looked and felt. I wanted things to stay this way, so we've started a weekly cleaning routine, trying to stay on top of clutter and piles and to take care of some areas where we've done some renovations lately that we want to keep nice. We each have our tasks from dusting and mopping the floors to cleaning crumbs off the stove top to dusting and vacuuming.

I've also tried to tackle larger projects in smaller bits. Instead of trying to do everything in one Saturday (making everyone grumpy about losing the whole day and failing to get everything done anyway), I'm trying to pick one piece and assign it to a week. Like this past weekend, my son and I worked on his closet, emptying my stuff out of it to open up space for his stuff as he has gotten older, and moving his stuff into it. Is his room perfect? Hardly! But we are a little bit closer. Next weekend, the extra task is mine and mine alone - the boys can have the day off after we finish our regular cleaning routine.

After a month of this, I noticed something I didn't expect.

It's made me more grateful for our home.

It feels like a privilege to care for it week after week. It feels like OURS when we work on making it look nice together.  I am hoping our weekly care and cleaning as well as future improvement projects will help me continue to make peace with our small house - to see it as a gift to use for our family and to show hospitality to others.

Your Kitchen Cupboards

Think about your kitchen cupboards.

Do you use every item in those cupboards? Or do you have a few go-to pieces that you use all the time?

Do you clean out your pantry, moving older items up to the front? Or do you put new things on the front of the shelf and use whatever you grab first?

What's in your basement? Or your closets? Do you know? Are there things that are broken? Things you don't use?

I never used to think much about these things until I had to clean out my dad's house this summer. He had four TVs in his house. Only two were plugged in and he only used one of those. Of the other two, one was the HUGE TV we had had in our family room 30 years ago when I was a kid - the sort with buttons and knobs and no remote. Why he still had it, I don't know.

In the basement, he also still had the hideous couch my parents owned in the early seventies (I think of it as the "straw couch" in that my coloring on it with a red crayon when I was around three was the "straw that broke the camel's back," sending me to day care and my mom back to work.)

While Dad's health declined, he stopped cooking, so there were many pots and pans that were in pretty sad shape when I found them. Half the food in the cabinets had expired. He had boxes of crystal wine glasses stashed in a hall closet. I'm guessing they were my mothers, so he saved them, but had replaced them long ago. After this summer, I no longer wondered where my pack rat tendencies came from!

In the weeks of cleaning things out, throwing away damaged and broken items, and stacking multiples of things, a sense of desperation grew. I started thinking about my own home - the things I don't use, the broken things that get set aside to fix later, the unfinished projects, the old toys and clothes stashed in a closet because no one wants to part with them, even though no one uses them.... Every time I called home, I told my husband we HAVE to clean out our house. We have to simplify to the essentials so someone doesn't have to go through our house this way, wondering why we have kept the things we have.

With the start of my new job, that cleaning project hasn't happened, yet. But I have my eye on Christmas vacation....