Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Letting Go and Restoring Rest

I've been thinking a lot recently about who it is that God really wants me to be.

I have a lot of ideas about the person that I should be. I should be the person who keeps the house clean, the laundry washed, dried, folded and put away, and who puts delicious nutritious food on the table for each meal. I should be the person who decorates the house for each holiday, plans wonderful parties for each child's birthday and never forgets an important date.

But I'm not that person. Dishes sit in my sink more often than I'd like and my son comes to ask me if I know where any clean socks are. I am not a party planner or big decorator. These things just do not come naturally to me. Oh, I do them when the need becomes great enough but they are not what makes my spirit soar or my soul sing.

What does?

Writing, even though it is an art I have far from perfected, fills me with energy. Reading good books nourishes my soul. Learning with my children brings joy to my heart. Discussions with friends are important to my mental well being. All of these are reflections of who I am and the person God made me to be.

So even though there will always be those things that I must do even though they do not come naturally to me I will let go of the expectation of being perfect at them.  I will instead embrace the me that God created and know the He does not make mistakes. I will rest in the fact that He loves me and made me who I am for a reason.

I will let go of the need to be like others I admire, and rest in knowing that I am good enough just the way I am. I will let go of needing others to approve of me and rest in the approval of my Creator. I will let go of the pressure to be like that mother or wife and rest in being the mother and wife that created me to be in this family.

This is where I belong and who I am supposed to be and here is where I will find rest.

And now, I'd love to know, who did God create you to be?



FaithBarista_Rest2JamBadge


4 comments:

  1. So glad you can rejoice in how God made you! Blessings!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a beautiful thought. Whatever God made me to be, He must've made us both from similar cloth: My son can't seem to find any clean socks, either, and I'm not an event organizer.

    And that's ok! :) We're all gifted differently. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes! You sound a lot like me. The combination of perfectionism and wanting to demonstrate every good quality of every wife/mom/Christian I know sets an impossibly high standard. I recently realized, too, that I try to meet not only what others expect from me, but what I perceive that they expect from me. (Hence the "pea" analogy.)

    So like you, I'm realizing that I only need to be who God designed me to be. Thanks for sharing this post!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, what a great post (and great thought-sparker!). Sometimes I feel like I struggle too because I don't seem to be what all the homemaker books tell me I should be. I think there's an element of searching God's will and changing ourselves for the better AND there's an element of searching God's heart and appreciating ourselves the way he made us.

    Thanks for sharing--it's given me a lot to think about!

    ReplyDelete