Giving it up

For the past five years, my primary job has been a stay-at-home Mommy.  It is something that I actually love doing, and seem to be good at, although there was never an aptitude test in high school that could tell me that.  When I consider everything that I do: keeping up with laundry so everyone has appropriate clothes to wear, washing dishes and preparing meals so we are all nourished, teaching the children how to play basketball and match pictures and clean their room and climb monkey bars and take turns...the term that comes to mind is manager.  I am the boss; I like doing it and I seem to be good at it.  But I am also a person, which means that I am imperfect, I make mistakes, and every day I deal with stuff that is completely out of my control.  So the other side of the coin is that I am a Christian.  Which means that I believe that God, my God, is the ruler of the universe and everything in it.  And since He created and runs the whole show, I can have peace by placing my life under His control and following His will.

That's a scary concept for someone who likes to manage.

Years ago, someone very wise and very caring described it to me like this:
  If your life is a sheet of paper, with all your concerns and loves and fears contained upon it, then becoming a Christian is like handing the paper to God and saying, "Here you go.  Take my life and let it be consecrated unto Thee." (or something like that...)  But sometimes we get scared.  We worry that God isn't big enough or smart enough or present enough to handle everything on that paper.  So we rip off a corner and say, "This is my relationship with my sister.  I think I'll take this back and handle it the way I want."  Or you take another chunk off, and say, "This is how I feel when I see people who are suffering, and I don't like the way you want me to act towards them, so I'll just go back to what I'm comfortable doing."  And pretty soon you have your life back, in pieces, and you are once again trying to figure out how to deal with everything on your own, without the God of the universe guiding you.

Today, I recognize that I can't actually control much beyond my own response to the world around me.  What I need for my life to work is to hand God that whole sheet of paper, intact, and let him carry my burdens for me.  I sat down and listed everything that I care about, what keeps me up at night, my worries and fears and the people and things that I sometimes find myself worshiping instead of the One who gave them to me in the first place. (I showed the list to Chris, and he said, "That's a long list."  Yeah, I'm a control freak!)   I want to give it all to God, and I know that when I do, He'll care for everything on my list better than I can myself.