Painful contractions. Fears of early labor. Lack of sleep. Blood results that confirm anemia. A failed glucose tolerance test. A three-hour repeat test. Managing my work duties. Too much housework. Daily technology issues in my classroom. A four-year-old facing a phase of defiance. A husband in the midst of coaching football. A death in the family. Late nights and early mornings. The "go here" and "do this" every day. And to top it all off, more than forty hours of work lost in a matter of seconds. The past two weeks have been building for me. Stress has mounted. I've been reading a devotional about truly counting the gifts God has given me, though, so for the most part I have been able to turn to Him and see the blessing in the brokenness. I could see the beauty in it all--how God was shaping me into the person He wants me to be. Maybe that's why the challenges were mounting, but I was pretty well taking them all in stride. Then Friday came. The epitome of my stress, and I was devastated in a moment.
Children in bed and household responsibilities under control for yet another day, I sat down to complete my current unit plan while my husband worked on his master's course homework. It was quiet, and I was eager to be productive in finalizing this project I had been working on for weeks. Earlier in the day I had felt so confident about this unit; I was finally making my grammar instruction into something usable for students and applicable to assessments they would soon face, and the pacing and design of it all felt comfortable. The most exciting part of it all was that the software I was using to develop the unit allowed me to incorporate explanations of topics, examples of concepts, images of exercises for discussion, links to online resources, class questions for immediately assessing student understanding, quizzes to check individual mastery of an idea--I had pulled out all the stops, and it was a work of classroom beauty! I literally thought, "Wow! This unit is going so well, and I can't wait to be able to use all of it again." We teachers lesson plan daily, weekly, monthly even when we're "off the clock" or on summer "vacation," and we hope and pray to be able to find that sort of mastery of the content--those lessons that just work so well that we can pick them right up and use them again "as is" with success and ease. I was in that zone: a true sense of accomplishment!
Then on that peaceful Friday night with my laptop at the ready in front of me, it happened. I plugged in my USB drive, opened the file, and found destruction. The software opened, flashed an error message, replaced all of the sections with blank pages, automatically saved itself, and crashed. In just one moment all of that near-perfection was destroyed. I was destroyed. I felt like I was going to get sick. I shamefully used a few choice words, said a desperate and angered prayer that God would return my work to me, turned to my husband for any technology tricks he might have up his sleeve, emailed our school technology coordinator hoping for something magical, read online to research the problem, and learned that the version of the software that I had at home had a bug in it that caused this exact error. Even though I had managed to miss it several times before, this time the bug had gotten me. It won. I lost. Angry and defeated, I gave up an hour later and recoiled to my bedtime routine--knowing hopelessness and feeling attacked. All of those hours had been for nothing.
When I woke the next morning, the sting of loss hadn't left my heart, but I knew that I had to carry on--pick up the pieces and learn a lesson from it all. I got ready for the day, gathered my materials for the task ahead, and left home headed to the hospital for my three-hour glucose tolerance test. Yet I couldn't shake the anger. It wasn't until an hour later as I waited in the admissions room at the hospital all alone that I asked the question: what is wrong with me?! It's not just this instance; I typically react to this sort of small-scale daily bad situation with this sort of negativity. Hiccups in the day can, and often do, just set me off, and it's not just the pregnancy hormones! With the "big" challenges in life, I rely on God, see his plan, find his blessings, and become an overcomer. With all else in life, I react with anger or devastation; I let things get the best of me.
I started to really think about that problem; I know so many people that face this same mentality in the moment things go "wrong." Why do we do that? Even when we know God is right there in the trial--big or small--and waiting to love us through it, we face frustration alone. The problem with my series of stressful situations in the past two weeks is that I didn't actually turn to God; I turned to anger, to frustration, to helplessness--these feelings where the moMEnt centers on me, not God. In those moments when things don't go the way we plan or the way we know they should, we find ourselves at a loss. It's quite often our self-centered nature that takes over. For me it's often even finding myself a victim of the situation itself, and this thought sickens me!
With all I have faced in life, with all of the trials and pits God has brought me through, I have always seen my reaction to each challenge as a choice: choose to be a victim or choose to be an overcomer, conquer or be conquered. It is one life philosophy I hold dear, and I have seen the blessings that result from turning to God in those challenges; He carries me through even when I don't know how I will take the next step. Why then do I become a victim and see it as a moMEnt instead of a moMENT? Why do I focus on the impact on ME and not on what it is that I am MEANT to learn from the experience? God wants me to grow, to seek Him, to glorify Him, and each challenge is a chance to do all three at once. There is blessing in the burden--grace in the glitches.
This morning as I read God's Word on the way to church, I found myself in Colossians 3. In the beginning of the chapter Paul talks about making Christ the focus of our lives, and instantly I thought, "Yes! This is what I need to remember for times like this." The first two verses say, "If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth" (NKJV). This lack of focus is where my negativity begins--where moments defeat me. I must remember to turn to God and not to the failings of this world.
As I read on, though, I read the familiar "put off all these" with a list of ungodly things and the obvious "put on" followed by a list godly actions and ideals (longsuffering being the one that stood out most for me right now), but verses 14-16 hit my heart hardest: "But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of God rule your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom." As we pulled into the church parking lot, I had tears. God's love is our link to perfection. His peace is the cure to our pains. Thankfulness is the solution to the problem. Wisdom is in God's Word!
This message was reinforced for me as I listened to today's service. As pastor K said, "When God tests his children the purpose is to prove to us that our faith is real, and that God can be trusted," I was so thankful for the trials. In spite of the difficulty of where we may be in a moment or in a series of moments that become months or even years, we have God's favor. He is in our corner! As the Chris Tomlin song lyrics go "The God of angel armies is always by my side"! Sometimes we focus so much on the trial itself that we forget how God works. The outcome of all trials is blessing when we realize that God is with us in the trial. Just as he brought us to the trial, He helps us through the trial when we seek Him, and He deserves the glory at the end of the trial.
As I focus on the moment when things go wrong, my priority becomes the failure. God wants us to focus on His love, not the failures of this world. The most assured success we can have in life is to place our trust in God; Psalm 118:8 says, "It is better to trust in Lord than to put confidence in man" (KJV). I move forward out of (or still in) my series of seriously stressful situations today with renewed trust and faith. Technology will fail us. Children will challenge us. Pain may come. Health may waiver. Death is a certainty. And yet God has it under control, and my hope is in Him.
Revelations 4:11 has crossed my path three times already this month: "You are worth, O Lord, / To receive glory and honor and power; / For You created all things, / And by Your will they exist and were created" (NKJV). At the end of my series of seriously stressful events, I am reminded that God deserves the glory. Today I pray I am a blessing to Him; may I glorify Him in all I do, including the way I react when the moment isn't going my way. May I see how I am meant to grow from each challenge I face.
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