boy oh boy have i learned a lot in such a short period of time. i have lived away from “the city” for two months now. it is quiet. there are many days every week that i don’t even leave the house. i have been studying and preparing to get my home inspector’s license or i am reading. i have even found that i waste a good amount of time.
what’s interesting to me is the change in perspective. i don’t know about you, but i am terribly hard on myself. i want it all to be done well and done right the first time. if you know me, you’ll know that battle with eating healthy and working out has not gone to plan. it hasn’t been done well or right the first time, or the second, or the…. if you know me well, you may know other places that i simply am not crushing it in life.
but here is the fun thing….
going into this season – a season where i lived far away from people and felt like God was secluding me in a lot of ways – i felt like it was about me. about learning about myself even more. a season of growing in areas where it is really hard to do when you are busy and surrounded by awesome people all the time. i felt like it would be hard, and it has been.
the first few weeks i wanted to rush the process. “can i just get it already?” “why can’t i ‘get’ this?” “will this be forever?” now i see myself settling into the process.
last week i got to house sit for a lovely family i know. i needed to study (which i am not good at anyway) but often found myself watching tv or putzing around doing nothing important. and then all of a sudden i understood what was causing me to be so distracted and waste so much time.
ok. so what? people see how they are being stupid all the time. people often see their own brokenness. their own failures. we are often acutely aware.
but in that moment i responded differently than i would have in the past. i smiled. i was grateful for this season to be able to even figure that out about myself. my perspective had changed and i got to see a little fruit of “nothingness”. i started seeing, especially in this season though i get to carry it through life, mistakes aren’t the issue.
mistakes aren’t the issue, choosing to live in them is the issue. mistakes aren’t the issue, they are just an indicator of something going on inside. mistakes are what happen on the way to greatness!
one of my biggest pet peeves is when people just assume a certain action means something specific is going on within someone. we don’t take any time to see that the mistakes we make, the sin we choose, are in fact symptoms of something else. we often assume. we decide that a + b always equals c. we assume that because this is happening in someone’s life that the root is always the same.
in fact, that is not the case.
what if we started asking questions instead of assuming? what if we loved like Jesus loved and didn’t attack people for their brokenness but met them where they were and loved the hell right out of them. what if?
we could change the world!