Simplifying me: What happens when you don’t

Overload.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all seen it.

Not pretty.

Not pretty at all.

When overload happens, you do goofy things like…

… losing count on how much food you’ve given your child via Gtube

… losing your debit card three times in the past two weeks

… losing your driver’s license for a week and praying you don’t get stopped by a cop in the mean time

… leaving a few minutes late for a softball game that is out in tin-buck-to only to be caught behind THREE, count them THREE seperate dump trucks the entire way there that were going 10 miles under the speed limit on a windy, curvy road with no possibility of passing them, thus making us 15 minutes late for the game, which the stupid (er… wonderful…) ump decided to call the game 25 minutes early and refused to let us keep playing, thus making the whole entire trip there a waste of time 

… leaving your car running with half of the stuff for your sister’s baby shower in it and closing the door, not realizing that the doors will automatically shut then running home in someone else’s car to get the spare key and all the way back  only to realize that the spare car key doesn’t work, then having to fork out $60 bucks to the locksmith who was so kind as to stop in the middle of doing yardwork and run over to help a girl out…

… making two trips to the grocery store before 7 a.m. to get items you forgot to purchase at the store in order to make stuff for said baby shower only to find out an hour later that you did, in fact, have both of those items in the pantry

… making a 45 minute trip to Babies R Us because you realize you got the wrong baby gift that was not on the registry, only to get there and find out that they were completely out of the kind that WAS on the registry, thus making the trip a complete and utter waste of very valuable time

… not realizing until the day above mentioned baby shower that eldest daughter had a girl scout ceremony scheduled that you planned to be at but was at the same exact time as the baby shower

Not that I did ANY of these things, mind you. None at all. I’m so totally on top of EVERYTHING.

That said, over last week and this week, four HUGE things have been finished, thus lifted from my plate.

1. Edits complete (HAPPY DANCE!)
2. Softball ends this week… I get my FIRST FREE SATURDAY this coming weekend… WOW!
3. Babyshower is over… I LOVED planning it and blessing my big sister… but it is a relief to have it over and have gone well, especially after what it took to get there!
4. School is ending this week!!!! While that does mean my kids are home all day, it also means no more rushing for the school bus, no more homework, no more school projects…

And on top of all this, my husband got a pretty big, scary relief this last week too.

He quit his job.

All things considered, this is pretty darn scary for us. But it was only temp anyway, had no benefits, and was to the point where the small monetary benefit it awarded no longer made up for the hardship it caused. My poor hubby was getting up at 4 in morning, working till 5 at night, then going to his 2nd job from 6 – 11 at night, then doing it all again the next day, plus working Saturday’s and Sunday evenings. He’d done this for 6 months now, and on top of the fact that it was physically demanding to the point of extreme pain at times, he felt it was time. No to mention the fact that the kids and I have seen very little of him since the fall.

He’s doing contract work at the moment, but that is off and on so isn’t guaranteed steady work at this point, but at least it will hopefully fill in the gap in the short-term.

Your prayers as we continue to seek God in all of these and make sure we are pointing our family in the right direction and making wise decisions are super appreciated. God is bigger than money and jobs and fears, and I trust him wholeheartedly.

Scott and I really struggled with the whole job thing this past month (thus the unspoken prayer requests.) It’s super hard to make decisions that are scary, that bring in a big ? instead of surity. It seemed to me that it would be complicating our lives more to quit than to simplify them.

But I’m realizing that the opposite is true. Sometimes doing the scary thing, the not sure thing, and having to really come to a greater point of depending on God, is the simpler thing to do.

How easy is it to do that? To hold onto things that are obviously not good for us out of fear of the consequences of quitting?

My motto has always been this:

Quitting something is not bad. It implies (for me) that you’re making the decision with forethought (and for the Christian, prayer.)

Giving up, however, is the lazy way out. It’s getting overwhelmed in the moment and throwing your hands up and saying, “Can’t do it, just am not going to try anymore.”

I try to teach my kids not to be quitters. But really, what I want is for them not to be “giveupers”.

Discussion: What have you “quit” lately that was super hard??