Thoughts are like slippery toddlers

I want to be nurturing, comforting, loving and kind.  I don’t want to fail or to feel like a failure or to hurt the people I love in my brokenness.  Who does?!?

I simply want my brokenness to serve as an opening for the Treasure to shine through, to give others a window to the One.

The thoughts of anxious wonderings stir my soul to wake and get to task.  Does this also wake my children?  Have I passed it on to them? An anxious recounting of tasks to do and tasks undone and tasks to be redone and those simply done poorly and deserving up recrimination…

What a dismal way to wake day after day – to an overwhelming sense that no matter how hard I try, it won’t all get done, there will be mistakes, and I will miss important opportunities.

The shortcomings and failures magnify themselves through the lens of “not enough” like grandiose paupers with puppet power to control and manipulate through fear and anxiety.

But all these vapid emotions do is suck the life from my day, usurping Peace and Trust with “oh no!” and “what if?”

And who wants to even wake, especially when the list is impossible and overwhelming?  No wonder I’d rather sleep.  No wonder.

Yet, I know that this is not my inheritance, that I really have the right to stay in a perfect peace.  It’s my mind that is undisciplined and unruly, taking thoughts and imaginations exalted and inviting them in to drink and dine instead of taking them by the horns and wrestling them to the ground to show them who’s boss.

But have you ever successfully wrestled a toddler slippery from the bath with more energy than is legal in a single substance?

Yeah, me neither.

I’m not certain, and there doesn’t seem to be a perfect formula, but I’m finding that sitting and opening my arms and inviting those thoughts to come near for comfort rather than for a lecture is, in fact, a better way of capturing them and reshaping them with truth rather than bludgeoning them with facts.

This particular morning, I do a combination of both until finally these words surge from beneath the pile:

The Lord is my Shepherd

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not…

Be anxious for nothing but in everything give thanks

Cast all your cares on Him for He cares for you

He works all things together for my good

and finally…

These light and momentary troubles are working for me right living as a default mode.  Amen and amen.  May it be soon, Lord.  That default mode?  I’d like it to be Peace and Rest and Trust. 

May it be so.