I forgot how satisfying taking on a project you’ve been avoiding can be.
For me, that was our backyard. I’ve been home for months complaining about how much of a huge mess it had become. The combination of chickens, dogs, creative boys, and rainstorms had made it an disaster. One I’d honestly rather complain about than actually do anything about.
Do you have those things in your life right now that you’d rather complain about than fix? This was just one of mine.
Early on Saturday morning, however, I finally pushed myself out the back door while my family was occupied with cartoons and video games. I put in my headphones and set to work. Though the curtains were closed to give myself the illusion I was having some quiet alone time as well – little heads peeped curiously out of one window after another mouthing through the glass “Mommy, whatcha doin’?”
I combed the grass finding random things the boys had brought outside for this adventure and that – tiny pen caps, legos, random socks, you name it. Things that seemed so vital to their story at the time, but then were discarded without a second thought soon after. I blew the leaves off the porch, scraped the dirt, and rinsed it off two or three times before it was clean. I cleaned and re-oriented their pool into the shade of the porch and rinsed all the pool toys they had thrown into the mud as part of a game last week.
For hours I wandered the yard in solitude making right what I had avoided for weeks on end until I could finally sit on the porch and watch the kiddie pool fill with clean water and bask in the satisfaction of a job complete.
Now it’s Monday, and I don’t know if, like me, you made promises to yourself on Sunday about how this week was gonna go – things you were gonna do, new choices you were gonna make. It seems so easy to create a vision on Sunday and so hard to implement when Monday actually comes around.
So my prayer today is for the grace to step out on the porch and roll up our sleeves and get to work on the promises we made ourselves. May we have the strength to show up and move another step forward towards the person God knows we can be.
