Measuring With The Wrong Stick

Ok, so I know I’ve been absent for a while. I could give you all kinds of excuses about how we went on vacation for Fall Break, and how it rained for what seemed like a million days straight and I couldn’t get my head right, and how I’ve been distracted from just about everything by just about everything else (is that even technically possible?), but if you’re anything like my high school band director, you don’t want to hear any excuses. So, just in case you’re one of those who don’t like them: No excuses. I’ve been gone, and today I’m back.

I think I’m going through another one of those weird seasons in my life where I’m just not sure what to think about myself from day to day. I don’t know why I go through these cycles, but this latest one is particularly…well, personal. I don’t know, is it strange to take your own self-criticism too personally? Well, strange or not, that’s where I am.

It’s just that I’ve always been an achiever. For so long my life was measured in milestones and accomplishments, and then I began to live my life for something else. Suddenly the achievements didn’t matter so much. I began to realize that my GPA or class ranking really wasn’t the most important thing about me, and that my greatest attribute didn’t really have anything to do with me at all. Christ became the best part of me, and I let it rest in that. I knew that He must become more and I must become less.

So how is it that now, some 16 years later, I’ve once again returned to a place where I’m measuring my life with a sad ruler marked by other people’s accomplishments? Lately all I seem to be able to think about is the fact that I’m 31 and I haven’t even come close to “arriving” at the same place as other people my age. This one has a PhD, that one is a doctor. She has twins, is in ministry, and still has time to do all the things I’ve said I can’t do because I have children and am too busy with youth (and she does them very, very well). She’s written a book, he owns a business. I look at that, and I feel like I’m watching a ship sail away from the dock where I’m standing, knowing that everyone on board is headed for something I’m going to miss.

How dumb is that?

I mean, really?

And yet I let it get to me. I argue that I wish I just knew something – like really knew something on a very educated, expert level – that could actually help someone. After all, that’s the way I’m wired. I love to learn, and I love to help people. And right now, I feel like I’m doing neither of those things. I’ve backed off from working with youth (unintentionally), and I’m not studying a thing. It just makes me feel stagnant. And then it makes me feel sub-par on some level. And then I look right back to that ugly ruler filled with other people’s lives, and it makes me feel lost.

I had been marinating in these thoughts for a while, when I stood in my kitchen and looked out a rather dirty window the other day. It was then that things began ever so slightly to change.

You see, fall is in full swing here. I can’t believe that I grew up thinking my grandfather was nuts for driving all the way to Tennessee just to see “some dumb leaves”. Oh, had I known what I was missing, I believe I would have hitched a ride. I love fall. I love hillsides blazing with reds and oranges and yellows. I love the crispness in the air and the total change in atmosphere. I secretly even love football season (but DON’T tell my husband…). I love fall!

So the other day I took just a second to peek out my kitchen window and look at the mountain behind my house. This time of year that mountain is like something from a painting, with its dusky browns and bright patches of life-giving orange and red. But for some reason, that day it wasn’t quite as beautiful as it could have been. Something was muted about it, flat and not at all what I remembered that mountain looking like before. What could have possibly happened to an entire mountain in its annual prime to make it so boring and average?

It took me a second to figure it out, but I finally realized that the problem didn’t lie in the mountain at all. Instead, as I pulled my gaze back to something a little closer, I realized that my window had become horribly dirty. Spider webs clouded it from the outside, and something had obviously splashed against it from the inside, leaving a map of filmy white drips when it dried (I can probably thank a certain 4 year old for that, but I digress…).

Then it hit me. There wasn’t a thing wrong with that mountain – it’s still perfectly beautiful, just as God intended it to be. What was blemished was my point of view. I was instantly struck with the realization that my life is no different.

God doesn’t see me as sub-par, or lost, or stagnant or left behind. He sees me as perfectly beautiful, just as He intended. I may not be a medical doctor or using a master’s degree to counsel people with serious issues, but I’m who I am because this is the life God has for me. I’m the mom of two kids and the wife of one man, and the sound tech and taxi driver for the youth. I’m an occasional speaker and a wannabe writer, and child of the living and active God. I’m just what He created me to be in this season, and He isn’t done – I might not have even hit my “fall” yet. If I can’t see that, it’s because I’ve allowed something to cloud my point of view. It’s my eyes that aren’t measuring up, not my life.

So I’m vowing to do two things in my near future, and the first is to break that stupid ruler I’ve been using. I want to get back to a place where I’m really living like Jesus is the best part of me and that I don’t need anything else to make me whole. I realize it might take a little time to stop comparing, but I’ll get there eventually.

And the second thing I’m going to do?

Clean that nasty kitchen window.

Happy fall, y’all!