Time

Already wondering what I was thinking when I wrote a couple days ago.  Why, again, did I want to return here?

So often I'm prompted toward what doesn't make sense.  Or, probably, more correctly worded, I'm prompted toward what goes against my flesh.

I was praying yesterday, lying on the floor of my room, and in need of answer.  I wasn't feeling desperate or sad.  More like anxious and slightly irritated.  I felt indecisive and feeling that way makes me grouchy.  It's all a time issue.

The setup now is that my kids go with their dad, one to two days a week.  At first I hated it.  Now I love and hate it.   In the beginning, I just felt lost without them and sort of wandered around the house in not quite knowing what to do with myself.  As time went on, I began to look forward to these breaks,  anticipating my 'alone time'.  My 'me time'.  But I've found lately, that these days arrive and I want to squeeze everything into a twenty-four or forty-eight hour period.  I want to write, do schoolwork, clean, paint, shop, catch a meeting.  But the bottom line is, that usually I can't do all that.  So then I feel stuck on the prioritizing.  What do I want to do? What do I want to do most?   This has become a pattern for me.  And I find that I've become resentful when asked to do anything I don't want to do on these days.  I've become selfish with my time.  This time where I end up not really accomplishing much of anything because I'm so busy debating on what the best way to spend my time is and I get angry if something pops up that isn't in line with the plan I haven't created yet.  It's ridiculous, really.

So, yesterday, that's the place I was in.... and I realized I'm sick of it.  So I prayed.  I asked for direction.  And I do pray every morning that God would direct my thinking.  But the goofy thing is,  I rush through the prayer so I can get on with my day, thereby, negating the entire purpose of the morning prayer.

So I'm laying there, and God shows me that I'm going about it all wrong.  I'm stuck because I'm trying to figure things out.  I'm trying to get the most for me.  What do I want to do with my time? Well,  it's not my time.  That's what God told me.  It's His time.  So, maybe, that's a basic understanding for most but it came as a revelation to me.  I hadn't looked at it like that before.  I had tried other 'tricks': gratitude, being in the moment, attempting to not rush.  But honestly, these things weren't working real well.

So, realizing that my time- my time with or without the kids, really belongs to God, seemed like a relief.  Surprisingly, I didn't feel the need to fight against that idea.  It didn't feel like God was snatching something from me and had plans to fill my time up with selfless acts of service.  Rather, it felt like a responsibility was lifted.  If it's God's time and not mine, all I have to do is obey His leading.  That removes the pressure of figuring out my every moment and then worrying about if I've chosen the most 'fruitful thing'.

So, I agreed.  With God.  With relief.  And I'm here.  Because it seemed, this morning, as if this was a good place to start.

And you know, a lot of things are being 'taken' from me right now.  In a spiritual sense.  And that's okay.  In fact, it's actually, pretty good.