Friday

I am trying to stay in the habit of writing everyday. It's advice I was given back in my high school creative writing class. I am not good at everyday. I'm good at periodic short bursts. I'm good at starting and then leaving incomplete.

It's certainly something that bothers my loved ones, this lack of follow-through. I have a bad habit of leaving cabinet doors and other doors wide open. The other night, for example, Brian went up to put the kids to bed. I let the dogs out and sat back down on the couch. It got progressively colder and I couldn't understand why.

I posited that I must really be coming down with an awful bug; upon Brian's return he noticed I had left the slider open. Not wide open--our slider doesn't really open that far. It was open enough, though, to explain the drop in temperature in the room.

One of my most prized possessions is a t-shirt I received upon completing my first marathon. It had the logo for the marathon on the front. On the back is one glorious word: Finisher. I actually get emotional seeing other people run marathons because I remember that overwhelming feeling of putting my foot over the finish line.

It's indescribable, really. In one stride I went from someone who loved running to someone who completed her first marathon. It represented hours of sacrifice, of getting up early, going to bed early and spending a lot of time with my feet pounding the pavement.

The trick of the marathon is not actually to consider the entire 26.2 miles all at once. The race really is just about putting one foot in front of the other. Granted, you're doing that over a span of (in my case) almost 5 hours, but honestly, I didn't think about the whole thing at once. I just did the mile that was in front of me. I knew I could do one mile; I could do that in my sleep.

I psyche myself out about a lot of things. For example, I'm in the middle of a few longer-term projects--organizing the house and writing a book. Both tasks, when viewed as a whole, seem crazy overwhelming. My house is a hodge-podge of clutter, garbage and unmanageability. I have been working with the organizer for about 5 weeks. We have organized the laundry room, the big kids' closet and Doug's room.

I, however, can only see the negative spaces, the ones we haven't done yet. It's an infuriating trait because we literally sorted through and pared down boxes upon boxes of clothes to give Doug a chance to sleep in a room that didn't resemble a storage space in Hoarders. My laundry room is now streamlined and easier to navigate. Clothes don't sit around for days on end because there's no room for them in anyone's closet or dresser.

I have more clothes that I want to sell at an upcoming resale. Thanks to the organizer, I've already got them up on hangers and sorted neatly in Doug's closet. I am not scrambling to find something in the kids' drawers that fit them.

I'm not able to focus on all of the progress, though. What's killing me is the garage, my dining room and the growing pile of stuff that needs to find its way to the curb (broken TV, broken couch, broken lamp, broken vacuum, broken high chair). I can't seem to run the dishwasher enough and yet my drying rack is permanently full because I can't find space in my cabinets for everything. There are several piles of various papers teetering like the leaning Tower of Pisa all over my counters.

I made a great start on my book this week--it's at almost 9,000 words so far. The thought that's running around my mind like a runaway train, though, is why haven't I done more? Why haven't I written 25,000 words? How many words long will this book be?

It's a peculiar twist in my mind that haunts me at every turn. When I trained for the marathon, I had a day-by-day schedule. I knew how much I needed to run every day so that I would be prepared to run 26.2 miles on race morning. I didn't run for two days and then run a marathon! It took months of building endurance, of learning techniques, of perfecting the art of staying hydrated.

It always comes back to grace. I forget to extend to myself that which I am so quick to extend to others and that which my Creator so lovingly extended to me. I am nothing more than a work in progress. We will be living in this house for many years; there is no rush to make it perfect because the way the house is being used will surely change as time wears on. I believe that God is prompting me to write this book; He would not give me more than He thinks I can handle and He always completes the work He begins.

My favorite definition of humility is not thinking less of myself but thinking of myself less. I have to realize that the help I need to complete any of these tasks is available; I just have to kneel to receive it.