Grateful, but Worthless

I was emptying the dishwasher tonight, trying to work magic on a disastrous kitchen, because Doug had just sent me an excited text saying he was coming home tonight, instead of tomorrow! Of course I was happy to have him home early, and more happy he was able to cut his travel from five days this week to only four. The news, however, also cut my "Sew all week, don't clean, Doug won't be home til Friday", plans from five days to four.

So here I was frantically switching from sewing to straightening. Now I don't know about you, but I do a lot of thinking when I wash dishes. Tonight was no different. I began to think about how I was going to finish the dress I was sewing and still make two more before next week started. Then I began to wonder how I was going to get all my Thanksgiving dishes prepared plus clean the house and get all the beds ready for the houseful of family coming for the holiday. Then the tightening began in my stomach and that gave way to feeling pressure to complete all the other holiday projects I wanted to accomplish before the year ended. Then that pressure caused me to remember all the things I had hoped to get done this year and didn't. It happens every year this time... the "I'm grateful, but I'm worthless" syndrome. I can manage to give grace to every one else and find gratitude for everything God has done for them throughout the year, but all I can muster for myself is a list of should-haves and didn'ts. And the list is accompanied by the worst finger-shaking, stare-down-your nose, tsk-tsk-tsking any shamer ever dished out. I humiliate myself.

Fortunately, I had just been thinking about the benefits of a change of attitude, and the scripture in Romans 12 where the Apostle Paul admonishes us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We may not be able to change our circumstances, but amazingly, we can completely change our outlook (and often that tightening in the gut). It's as simple as refusing to dwell on the negative and concentrating on the positive. Satan would love for us to mope around feeling sorry for ourselves, resenting others, or feeling defeated about our lives. It keeps us depressed and miserable. But, we can choose to be humbly grateful or grumbly hateful. It's our choice. And we have the ability to make the change! Incredible!

A quick remembering of this little talk I had with myself earlier in the week was all it took for me to recalculate my failures for the year. While I had made progress on some of my goals, I had failed miserably at others and reached none of them completely. "But why hadn't I?", I asked myself. "Because of the choices I made. I chose others things, and that always gets me in trouble", I chided. So I decided to think back over what those choices were.

While I didn't publish this year again, I have been working on several manuscripts. I also spoke to several hundred precious women on the Island of Curacao about relationships and shared a week's worth of counseling lessons with another group of women studying to be lay-counselors and directors for Women's Centers spread out all over the world. I researched and wrote a brochure about sex-trafficking, at the request of a special counselor with the Salvation Army in Sri Lanka who wanted to leave hundreds of them in places frequented by innocent victims in hopes they might realize there is hope and a way out.

Closer to home, I celebrated 12 family birthdays with loud dinners and lots of laughter, and loads of clean-up from the parties in the dining room or around the pool. I babysat too many times to count, picked up grandkids from school at least 75 times and fixed as many after school snacks, listening to all the playground happenings and show-and-tells. I monitored bike races and hop-scotch in the driveway, learned LEGO Star Wars on X-Box and graduated to designing my own Mii and making it to level 5 on Indiana Jones on the Wii.

I grew butterflies, baked cookies, sewed a butterfly costume for one granddaughter's 5th birthday and a ballerina tu-tu for another granddaughter's 5th birthday. I happily made it through a week at DisneyWorld with all our kids and grandkids and just as happily persevered through our first official "Cousins Camp", toting 4 of our grandkids (just Gigi and Papaw!), to our place on N. Cap during the only week this year it was actually too cold to swim in Southern Florida! We colored a lot of pictures!

I said a final good-bye to my father-in-law (and my dog), and helped my husband care for his sweet Mama's heart and home in the weeks following the funeral, and I (and my sissies), planned a whoppin' bash for my parents 60th wedding anniversary, all experiencing both the joys and sorrows of aging. And during the months in between, I sewed curtains and painted walls to make welcome our 6th grandbaby. A-h-h, the circle of life.

I enjoyed the best 53rd birthday ever by hosting a slumber party for all my grandkids, followed by my very own party at Chuck E. Cheese's and an adult version at the Country Club that night. I safely traveled on about 18 separate flights, and logged hundreds of miles in the car, washed thousands of pounds of clothes, cooked lots of meals (but not as many as I could have), cleaned the same toilets and vacuumed the same carpets over and over again, walked, fished, read, wrote, planned, worried, counseled, prayed, sang, laughed and cried.

So amidst all this living, I didn't get a few things done. Big things, as far as my list of goals goes, but somehow they pale in comparison to the important things in life. Now that I've looked over the choices I made this year, I fully intend to make the same choices next year, too. I also fully intend to make another list of goals and work toward completing them. Goals are good. They keep us pressing onward. It's when they govern even our sense of worth that they become more like demands.

Yes, next year I want to lose some weight, start walking again, and submit some things to publishers. But more than any of these, I want to choose to cherish the important relationships in my life, even if doing so crowds my list a little.