I am often convinced that I am just a failure.  I always…always…focus on everything that I am not doing well.  And there’s a lot.  So, so much.  I’m a terrible finisher.  One need only take a walk around my yard and inside my house to see it – weed-infested gardens, half-stripped front doors, stacks of clothing bins and piles of clothes, notebooks full of to-do lists that never get fully done…evidence all around me that I’m not good enough.  It makes me think that the walls might literally crumble around me because I can’t do all that I’m supposed to do.

But while I think it is true that, for whatever reason, I am just not as capable or motivated or energetic or organized, or whatever, as many people, the reality is also that life is moving forward.  We have three meals a day.  We have clean clothes and clean sheets.  The kids’ schoolwork [mostly] gets done.  Boys get haircuts. Verses get memorized.  Shopping gets done.  Books get read to my little girls, over and over and over sometimes.  We pray and we sing and we read the Bible together most mornings and every night.

And somehow, kids learn to read, and ride bikes, and swim, and vacuum, and fold laundry, and bake banana bread, and mow the lawn, and use a screwdriver, and play piano, and play chess, and say I’m sorry…and even though I often don’t remember the question that got asked about how to cream butter and sugar, or the 30 second lesson on towel folding, I know they happened along with thousands more similar interactions.

So, when I get to the end of my day and think nothing got done, I need to learn to remind myself about the naptime reading, and the baby feeding, and the cleaning-up of wetting accidents, and the four loads of laundry, and the figuring out how to use all those tomatoes, and the printed return labels, and the disciplining, and the exhaustion that was because the little girls didn’t want to sleep last night…not because I’m just a wimp.

I need to remind myself, not so that I can try to forget about doing better, but so that I can realize that, often, the things that take precedence are simply the things that keep life running smoothly in the moment…and that, often, those are the things that matter most, anyway.