Living-Deliberately.com

I took a look at the evidence: I wanted to get out of the hospital…but I didn’t want to go home. I knew what waited there for me was an overwhelming project list and that “the only way out was through” because letting it go was not sustainable. And how. We left, rather abruptly, Friday night and after getting groceries, walked in just before 11pm. The fridge, which can’t hold it’s temperature and leaks water both inside and out, had “peed” rotten veggie water all over the floor. Since no one had been home to clean it up through out the day, the cummulative effect of 3 hot days was all over the green vinyl. The kitchen lighting was burned out. There was a mountain of clean-but-unfolded laundry covering the entire dining room table, Everest Style. That was what I could see from the door, without actually stepping inside yet.

What followed was a room-by-room assult of Things Needing To Be Done. I guess at the top is the room division project that continues to drag on; splitting one long room into two bedrooms divided by closets started in May (April?). This has the entire house in disorder: rooms that already serve many puposes now serve more and the result is chaos, a lack of structure, and disaray. Add to it the parade of “little” fixes that are necessary if we sell in the coming year…only late at night after a long week in a hospital and news that we are still adjusting to, they didn’t seem so “little”.

I had my moment of wanting to drop a match and walk away. I had my cry. I had a few hours of sleep. And then I got to work.

All day Saturday and into the night I worked. Sorting, washing, folding, ripping out the last of the carpet, padding, and tack strips, scrubbing, mopping…in between feeding a ravenous little boy on Steroids, talking on the phone, and ignoring my back injury. Two large van loads of stuff went to the dump and a third went to Goodwill. I stayed home from church, cried some more about missing communion and fellowship, and welcomed home the kids, who immediately went to work with me.

By last night we had a handle on things; the list is still quite long. The oven still doesn’t work, the wall needs building, walls require painting, thresholds and screens need replacing and something will have to be done with that fridge. There’s a stopped up bathroom sink, toilets that need new seals, siding that must be replaced, a broken window… and of course the Mt. Laundry will replenish itself, food must be prepared with care, meds needs to be handed out 3x a day, school for hungry minds, the grass is knee high, the garden swallowed the sidewalk, animals to get to their new homes, more animals to find homes for, and a new business to take care of….

So I took a look at the evidence. Life change is necessary when the status quo makes you want to flee; when it has reached a point of unsustainablity. If “The Only Way Out is Through” then pick something and get to work. My mom said, “this has ‘come to pass’, not ‘come to stay’.” Indeed. Inside of me there is a neat and orderly person trying to crawl out past the layers of mayhem; my outer doesn’t reflect my inner and it feels disingenuous and frustrating. It’s time to change some things.

Onward~

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