To do versus To Be

The goal: Get all this stuff, plus 3 kids
 and 2 adults out of the house by 7:05 a.m.

After battling the flu on Sunday and Monday, I heard Tim up in the bathroom at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning. And I knew. I would be getting the kids off to school and daycare by myself. (Bravo to anyone who does this all by her lonesome every day.)

It was 7:10. Things were going okay. I had all the kids in the car. We were all dressed, diapered, and wearing clean-ish underwear. Then I reached for the keys in the ignition, and realized they were on the counter. Of the locked house. I proceeded to bang on the door to drag my sick husband out of bed. I apologized, retrieved the keys, and headed to make stop number one at daycare. As I was peeling a tired, crying two year-old off my body, I realized I had forgotten to give him his antibiotic for an ear infection. I dropped off the two little ones, and turned the car around to go back home and grab the medicine. I ran into the now unlocked door and made it back in the car in record time. I was almost back to daycare when my fabulous daycare provider, Miss Pat, called to say she was missing bottle liners for the baby. I did a U-turn. I ran into the unlocked house again, grabbed what I needed and ran back to the car. Caleb called from the back, "Hey Mom, can you go get me some cereal in a baggie?"

I screamed, "No!" I sped back to Pat's and left everything I had forgotten on her doorstep (avoiding going inside the house and aggravating the now-calmed down 2 year-old.) I drove to Caleb's school. I ran him in, trying to entice him to play the game, "Can you speed walk faster than me?" I pulled into my school parking lot and dragged in my bags, including the 100+ research papers I had to have graded by Friday when report cards were due. I unlocked my classroom and walked in with the students. I let out a breath. It was 7:40 a.m. I was exhausted.

Things aren't always this crazy. (Thank you, dear husband.) But life is busy full.  I love teaching. I feel called to it, just as I feel called to parenthood.  Do I ever stop and ask myself if it's worth it, if it is all too much? Of course.

But the thing is, life was just as crazy when I was home on maternity leave. Just a different kind of crazy. A different kind of hard.
 

When I was home with the kids every day, I found myself making to-do lists of things I felt I should have accomplished by the time my husband came home -- laundry, dinner, an unloaded dishwasher. The reality was that it was hard at the end of the day to look around the house and convince myself I had anything accomplished, as I was plenty busy just taking care of the kids and keeping up with the new messes they created throughout the day. (Get one meal cleaned up, time for the next. Put folded laundry away, the hamper is full...) My friend joked to me, "My busiest 20 minutes of my day are the 20 minutes before my husband gets home, and I feel like I must prove that I did something all day."

Two years ago, after reading the book, Breathe by Keri Wyatt Ken, I wrote the following quote in my journal, "Our value comes not from what we do, but from who we are."

I love this idea.

The problem: Deep down, I really don't believe it. And my life reflects that.

I too often gauge the worth of my day -- and the worth of myself -- by what items I've checked off a to-do list.  I could tell myself that being unproductive is not a sin, but I live more like "idle hands are the devil's tools."

Isn't this also what the world asks us: What do you DO for a living? What did you DO today? 

What a difference it would make if I spent less time doing and more time being -- being quiet, being reflective, being aware that I'm a child of God, and there is nothing I can do (or not do) to be loved less.

If I could really digest that who I am matters more than what I'm doing, it would cause me to slow down -- not just physically -- but mentally.  It would require a different perspective and force me to consider what really matters and how joy should flow out of my life, regardless of situation. It would give me a different posture and help me to prioritize. It would help me to know that stopping to talk with one student might be more important than one more announcement made to the whole class. It would help me to remember that reading stories with my kids in a messy living room might be better than having them watch TV alone in a clean room. It would take away guilt about choosing to have more empty spaces on my calendar.

So, here's to a new week  -- and resting in God's grace, rather than running in circles after my own salvation.