Unwrapping My Friday

This starts with someone else's post. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Go read "One Thing My Soul Is Begging Me to Do." It's worth it, I promise. And then click over and read the link mentioned at the end, her piece at (in)courage. Got that? Okay, you're ready.


What does unwrapping my day today look like? It isn't Tuesday today, but most of my days these days are very ordinary, even the special ones, and I want to start this practice right this minute. Trying to remember the little ordinary moments from three days ago won't do, I want this day, now.


Can I answer her questions without drowning in tangential torrents, the backlog of trying to tell the stories of an emotional year? Well, let's see. Note to self: "Anything that causes you to pause and celebrate the moment. Not what will be or what is to come, but what is real and true this day: the messy, the lovely, and the unexpected."


The beauty of Gracie's face next to mine. We've gotten into a not super convenient habit over the last several weeks of letting her fall asleep cuddling next to us, and then transferring her to her crib afterwards, when she's deeply asleep. Both for naps and for the night. It may not be the wisest habit ever, not good preparation for the someday days when we hope we'll have a new baby, but ohh, she's so precious.

She's two years old. I know it doesn't look like it here.

These are from today. I cannot express all the love and peace and joy and awe contained in these moments. Or in the moment last night when I saw and heard her give a little chuckle in her sleep.

A lot of these little Gracie moments are found in texts to my husband, but I like the idea of regularly coming here and writing some of them down. More permanent, more celebratory.

The moment when she woke up this morning, and then laid down again in bed and said she was "sweepy still." Or when she pointed at a little hanging thread and lint combo on our blanket and asked, "Dis?" Then answered her own question a second later with, "Actually it's fuzz."

Hearing her expressive voice and high-pitched notes as she "reads" to herself.

I feel like I am in a time of healing right now. Things have calmed down, slowed down from the pace of crazy change and turmoil earlier in the year. There have been many moments of beauty like these.

I wonder as I write this, Am I a little too determinedly healing, not acknowledging the negative moments?

Not necessarily. The word that keeps coming up, "healing," implicitly acknowledges the griefs as well as the good and beautiful. It's all there, all there. Ah, what a lovely word. Thanks for this word, God.


As for the "fluttering anxieties" and "the phone call [I] dread making," there are two little things that are the main balls of worry and guilt right now: Christmas gifts and transferring Gracie's medical records to her new doctor.

Guilt because I haven't yet. Because I've let these sit so long. I haven't even checked and figured out yet where I am in my three-year rotation of gifts to my siblings. Need to get on that. And blech, the medical record thing means filling out a form, then probably calling our old HMO to find out if there's an email address I can send it to as an attachment, since I don't want to do snail mail and either way the specific contact information, the stuff that isn't the generic appointment line over a huge area, is always so very very hard to find. I'll probably have to call one person and then be transferred and then ask and maybe they'll make me send a fax so I'll have to go to an office supply store to do it, and then I don't know how long it will take them to process and I'll have to call the new doctor's office to find out if they've gotten the records yet... And all of this SOON, because everything will be harder and slower and closed over Christmas, right? And Gracie's appointment is already scheduled, for January 2nd. And I think I have all her immunization records, but I need to be really sure.

So what can I learn from these little anxieties? What does it mean to attend to my soul on these? How do I keep company with Jesus in this worry and guilt, instead of adding shame to shame?

Maybe... Turn and face into it. Do one little action on one of these today, and another tomorrow. And give it to God. Surrender. Trust.

No, neglecting my responsibilities won't cause the end of the world. Not even if the very worst happens, which would be what? Late Christmas presents and having to cancel a doctor's appointment with a very fully booked office, waiting quite a while for a new one? Or going through with it but wasting the doctor's time with the very little bit it would accomplish, and having to reschedule another one to figure out an immunization schedule? No, that wouldn't be good, and no, it wouldn't be the end of the world either, but... Okay, God cares about that little ball of worry and guilt, too, small though it may be in the grand scale of things. Thank You, God, for all of it. And for the people and relationships I have in my life in the first place, to worry about disappointing.


I got a shower today. Ahhh, that felt good. My first in I'm-embarrassed-to-say-how-many days. (How many do you think? Nope. More.) I'm going to try to shower more often. It's been tricky lately. Seems like it always is for one reason or another, but recently it's been because I've been getting up and going to bed at the same time as Gracie. But she likes sitting in her crib playing and reading stories, so I'm going to try to take advantage of that more often.

I'm thankful, too, for all the blog ideas I've had recently. Ideas both for individual posts, and for the direction of the blog as a whole. I look forward to unwrapping them with you, one at a time. There's so much that is good, true, and beautiful that I want to share. I'm grateful for the grace I've heard in my soul recently, acknowledging how important this blogging is to me. Again both on a high level, in terms of its place in my life focus, and then with the little things, like this blog post I'm writing right now, falling in my lap. Begging to be written.

That's not the best ever description of the ordinary beautiful of the blog-related thought moments, or why I think it's a "real and true this day" thing rather than a "what will be" thing, but I think it's the best I can do. Suffice it to say it's making me happy now, even in not-fully-realized form.

Even though I've been inconsistent in my posting and often away, even though it's such a small blog, there's a lot that's been happening under the surface recently. I think it's going to bear fruit, and I'm excited to share that with you. Excited to grow. Excited to write more, post more. Excited about one short series (really an epic long blog post, broken into pieces) I've been working on, that I think is almost ready. Nervous and afraid, too, but excited. Glad that, even though I still want to write and publish novels, I don't have to concentrate only or even mostly on that to be a "real writer."


What about you? Where did your mind wander to when you read the title, "One Thing My Soul Is Begging Me to Do"? What were the gifts and ordinary moments in your day today?