NaBloPoMo No Mo'

I guess I should be encouraged by my nonchalance about failing to post every day during NaBloPoMo. As a girl who struggles with legalism I wondered if I would be too stressed by the pressure to blog every day for a month but it turns out I don't care.

That's progress for a girl who considers a list a vicious taskmaster that mocks me every time I don't cross everything off my daily to-do list. And that's a lot of mocking because rare is the day that I accomplish everything I set out to do.

Every once in a while I get to a rest stop in my journey where I get the chance to look back over the ground I've covered and see just how far God's brought me. I found myself parked at one of those rest stops yesterday as I sat in stalled traffic on the interstate. The kids and I were already 45 minutes late for our field trip to the zoo (there might have been a minor altercation between myself and the GPS) and were now at a complete standstill on I-4 due to a car fire ahead of us.

And, oh yeah, I had to pee.

Not too long ago I would've been the crazy lady gripping the steering wheel, snapping at my children, with my stomach in knots while having to go to the bathroom.

1 glass of OJ, 2 glasses of water and a protein shake before getting in the car for an hour. Not my brightest moment.

And, yes, I would've acted like someone else's car fire was a bigger burden on me than them.

Instead I called one of the friends we were meeting, asked her to leave our tickets at the will call window and listened to "Pippi Longstocking" with the kids.

And tried not to thing about going to the bathroom.

*sidenote: "Pippi Longstocking" is kind of freaking me out. A 9 year old girl who binges on coffee, picks up horses and brags about her father being the king of cannibals... seriously trippy.

My point is this. I can't put my finger on a specific moment in recent months where I decided to chill out about stuff like this. It may have crossed my mind that getting a grip would be a good thing but I don't have the kind of willpower to make it stick. There was a time I would've seen a need to change my attitude and responded by heading to Amazon, looking for the highest rated book on the subject, read it, made a big announcement to PB about how I was going to change and then went on the attack.

For about a week.

And then fail miserably.

God works differently when He does His work in my life. I know some people have those Damascus road moments and I've had a few not as dramatic Damascus sidewalk moments, but the big and lasting changes God makes in my life usually happen in the least spectacular way.

I guess it goes back to the whole tree and the fruit analogy. You never see a tree straining to produce fruit; the fruit just comes. Someone else waters and fertilizes the tree and the sun shines whether the tree asks it to or not.

Psalm 1 tells us if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord we'll be like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in its season. It doesn't say to delight ourselves in the law of the Lord and then read every self-help book to fix whatever problem is inconveniencing us.

I'm far from fixed but that's no surprise to God. He's not stressed out by His to do list for my life. It's been nice here are the rest stop. I did finally get to pee, but now it's time to get going.