Our Instead

Some days you feel like you are rolling along and doing your life and busy and full and don't really have time to think if you are doing what you do best. But when you get a moment to yourself or get word that someone else was promoted or invited to do something you would really love to do and hope to do and have had visions of doing...because you know you could do it....the bigger than your daily groove kind of stuff.....you ask questions.

You wonder.

You get knocked around by jealousy and worth and your trajectory and dreams and plans and the Like icon.

You stand in your house with piles of laundry at one end, children yelling and pulling at each other on the other end and a mop in your hand. And you wish that mop was a microphone. Not just so your children can hear you better (that works) but so you can actually say something. Mean something. Create something. Encourage and help and bring life to others.

You wish that the pile of laundry didn't stare at you, suggesting you're the washed up one. The one with ideas and dreams that will not get put into their places, like fresh, clean clothes with ready shelving. A place. A space. A time for you.

You wish the fighting and pulling you see from your little ones was something entirely different; dancing or tickling or opportunities.

Instead you are here.  Right here. In that kitchen with that mop and those chores and those small funny little people.

Instead you are all of it together; dreams AND diapers.

Instead you are hopes AND hairbrushes.

You are grounded with dirt AND grabbing toward sky.

What do we do with our Instead?  I would love to be doing......but Instead I am.....

Don't we all most often live in our Instead? Most of the time it's just fine....but every now and then our need for bigness and greatness and giving our really fun human gifts to others to see how that changes the world rises up and we despise our kitchen and our mop and our people. And we cry.

And after we cry (or while we cry), we take the mop-microphone. We communicate. We mop and we say this is love, this domestic maintaining. And that matters. (God maintains. He holds it all together). We say we are still worth something even if our Instead is just an old, dirty mop.  We trust that our Instead is a work that God is doing. If it's humility, let it be. If it's refining, let it be. If it's being small, let it be. If it's tabled dreams, let it be.

And we whisper on the stage of our kitchen tile to our Creator. We tell Him our dreams, hopes, strengths. We ask if we can use them for bigness soon...we just want to feel alive in some of the greater ways....the soaring ways. We ask to accept our Instead now. We mop it out.

We mop and we mop and we mop until it's all out.