You Know It’s Time for Time Out When

You throw a handful of cranberries in your Egg Beaters, thinking you’ve grabbed the feta. You put the peanut butter in the freezer and the frozen yogurt in the cupboard. The dog has a mini seizure and freezes in the middle of the room you’ve rearranged. You have a mini seizure and freeze in the middle of the room you’ve rearranged.

Time for time out.

Even though the bottom drawer of the island is jutting out halfway across the kitchen because something fell behind it and the only way to fix it is to take all the stuff out, figure out how to release the track and get the drawer out, retrieve the stuck item, put the drawer back and then put all the stuff back, your anal-order trigger doesn’t even twitch because it’s just One More Thing Too Much.

That’s when you know it’s time for time out. And that’s what’s happening here this morning.

In a couple of days my husband will return home from wrapping up his father’s life in Florida. He will bring his father to live with us. We had always told Pa of course he was welcome but when the decision actually came, it came quickly.

Just five days ago, I had a comfy downstairs bedroom with bath, an office with a recliner, and a simple, comfortable living room. I seldom went upstairs where my daughter has a room and small bath and adjoining single-bed guest room.

Today, my bedroom is outfitted (with the recliner) for my father-in-law, my office has temporarily (?) become a bedroom, which we will use until we are sure Pa isn’t wandering around the house at night, and I don’t know what to do about the bathroom—share the little one upstairs? creep into the big one in the master bedroom and hope I don’t wake Dad? or keep a travel basket of toiletries in the half-bath so I can at least brush my teeth until he wakes up?

So many things to think about! I suspect if my ancestry was traced back, I’d find I belonged to the Tribe of Overthinkers. I even arranged Pa’s bed so he could get out the same side he has for decades!

But it wasn’t until I began upheaving our order that I realized it wasn’t so much the different room arrangements that were difficult to change as it was the habits that we have patterned into the spaces of them.

The dog was the first to reflect this.

I didn’t notice how stressful the commotion of furniture coming and going was, or strangers traipsing through to rewire the cable hook ups. I didn’t realize how much she missed Bob and the quiet early morning time they spent together in the recliner –she with her bone, he with his Bible.

I didn’t see the signs of her stress until she froze, unfocused in the middle of the room where her recliner used to be. She didn’t even move when I called her name. Then, I knew. It was time for time out.

I gathered her up and went into Pa’s room. We sat in the recliner and wrapped in a blanket. The simplest of prayers, “Lord.”

The simplest of responses, “O, Martha, Martha, take time out to remember the important: Be patient with change and hold your habits loosely, let love reign over order, and rest over raggy wretchedness.”

 I thought of the Proverb that says, Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure with turmoil. And another—Better a dish of vegetables than a feast with strife (My paraphrased version).

Laila and I fall asleep.

Yes. He restores my soul.

Dear friend, thank you for stopping by. If you are overwhelmed by a change, I pray the Lord deeply refresh you and give you peace in knowing to everything there is a season—even for time outs.

Marcia

When a woman swings a hammer and a man does the dishes

A young woman friend, who is exploring the dynamics of marriage, asked me if I had an egalitarian or complementarian slanted marriage.

I put down my hammer and said, “What?”  (Kidding, no hammer in hand at the time) But after a few decades of living with someone and growing in the Lord with them, the lines that once had been so carefully drawn were now smudgy and scribbled over. I had to think about it.

Having entered womanhood on the tailwind of the sixties, I had a skewed idea of what marriage should look like. I embraced liberated, unshackled, un-dominated Woman. Later I directed some of that confusion into a more grounded, back-to-the-land living. Still, my tepee dwelling days were a peculiar backdrop for marriage to a polyester-suited, God-loving, man from Queens.

I was a new Christian and didn’t know much about gender roles. I didn’t know men manned the barbecue, fixed the leaky faucets, and made the major decisions. Everything in me curled at the mention of submission. 

But I wanted to do things God’s way.

Actually, after having had to support and fend for myself, I was interested in seeing what being taken care of felt like. We sorted out our activities into he/she piles, but had a rocky go of it when it came to attitudes of heart.

One day I was particularly resentful of a decision my husband wanted to make. I was sure my way was the wiser choice. My body was sitting in on a women’s Bible study, but my mind was smoking and fuming. I mean, when you’re married, it isn’t like one person’s mistake is theirs alone. You both feel the ripples, or worse, waves of consequence. It didn’t seem fair I should suffer for my husband’s error (as I perceived it to be).

 I have no idea what the study was about, but I clearly remember hearing the pastor say, “Ladies, give your husbands room to make a mistake. Entrust yourselves to God.”

It was an arrow shot straight through my smog from the throne of God.

The idea I could trust God with my life, even when it meant trusting him with a decision I might not agree with, expanded in my heart.  God would take care of me even in the “we.”

 Unfortunately I didn’t  don’t always run to the Lord before opening my mouth in a disagreement, but when I do, sooner or later, either we come to a mutual agreement, or God gives me the grace and peace to lay it down and entrust my concern to him.

And as for the stuff of life—does it really matter who does the dishes or lays the tile? We give and take, step in for the weary one, and seek to live in peace rather than preference. I don’t know, does that make me a conservative complementarian egalitarian?

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who although he was in the form of God, did not count equality with god a thing to be grasped. . . and God has highly exalted him. . .--2 Philippians 3-5,9.

Blessings friends,
Marcia

From trash cans to tablecloths: A life in the hands of God

Before she knew how to read, ride a bike, or eat with a fork, little Carolyn Knefely knew how to survive. The oldest of three children, she was expected to take care of her brothers while her parents disappeared for days at a time—a tall order for a five-year-old.

Often left without food, she begged from the neighbors, rooted in trash cans, and taught her younger brothers (one still in diapers) how to distract the grocer while she pocketed something for them to eat.

A few years later, she and her brothers would count it a real treat when her new stepmother dropped them off at the movie theater for the day. The twelve cents she gave them didn’t go far, but there was always plenty of popcorn to eat—right off the theater floors.

I tried to align the image of this scavenging hooligan with the gracious woman before me about to demonstrate the proper way to approach a dining table—who knew there was one?

 “Enter from the right side of your chair,” she said. “Put your napkin on your lap with the fold toward you,” (images of mine spread out like a tablecloth across my knees). The lesson continued: how to pick the bread, and sip the soup, and lay the utensils to signal you’re done.

My instructor, the girl who didn’t know how to hold a fork until she was seven, is now a certified consultant in fine dining business etiquette and international protocol.

Don’t you love it.

 When weakness becomes strength.

When the place of adversity becomes the place of power.

When people rise above instead hide behind.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

But the telling has awakened memories of scrappy survival, emotional as much as physical, and there is no short route to this moment with the poised woman before me.

We go back to a day when her stepmother, angered because Carolyn wet the bed, threw the soggy mattress in the front yard and shamed her into spending the day on it for all to see.

Told repeatedly that no one wanted her, Carolyn lay on her mattress and prayed, “Dear God, Let me be your little girl.”

“That is what kept me sane,” she said. “Bad things have happened to me, but we all have choices. But it begins with the first choice—God.”

Over the course of the years to come, Carolyn would see how life-changing that first choice was and just how closely her Father had been watching over His little girl, as she made her way from stewardess to a sales and marketing exec, to career coach and fine dining business etiquette consultant.

 But that’s another story. 

I pray for anyone stopping by here today that you would be assured in the depths of your heart that no matter what the situation may look like, God’s plans are for good.With Him there is always a way.

Please visit Carolyn at http://www.teacupliving.blogspot.com