One Thing At A Time

These past days I found my plate beginning to fill to spilling... Usually nothing much happens around my place, my life, but now there is a chance Tom will get a job in Virginia, though at this moment, that is up in the air. But yes or no, we will be moving to a less snowy place someday so we are readying our house. I am painting wall after wall and tossing books I only mildly love, numbering almost 300 flung away so far. And I am tossing trinkets and papers and other stuff memory-producing.

And in less than two weeks, for the first time, my parents will come visit us for 17 days and I am trying to make this house so wonderful they will not believe it. The insecure part of me wants it all to be perfect and lacking in nothing, when of course, I should be wanting that simply for their vacation with each other and with us.

And our carpenter friend, the one who put in our amazing carport and then immediately afterward, had an accident which threatened his ever using his carpentry gifts again, well, he will be coming again next weekend, this time to put in French doors in our bedroom. Those doors will open into the bedroom next to it, a room we've always used for storage and for cats. Often for storage of cats, you could say, and the poor room is now a disaster and will need to be painted, redecorated and the floors sanded and that is what will be done by me. And the carpenter is set to finish this project, and some kitchen lighting ones, also, just a day or two before my parents arrive. (I won't even mention that I'll also have to shove stuff around our horrible Ma-and-Pa-Kettle-closet-like basement in order for the carpenter to do rewiring...)

Then today there is my dentist appointment and grocery shopping and helping my friend with her architect's plans for her house. And tomorrow there is my perm--I will walk the mile there and back because I'd rather not take Tom to work at 6 a.m. again as I had to this morning so to use the car. On Wednesday the French doors will come and I will be painting and painting on into Thursday...

And on and on it goes... From slow days of reading and gardening and dreaming upon our porch to that plate of Overflow.

And yet... and yet over and over I hear a voice inside which stops me in its simplicity and calm: "Just one thing at a time. Just think about and do one thing at a time."

And the peace returns because I can handle that. I can do that. I can do one thing at a time and enjoy that one thing until I have a whole string of hours of 'one things' which I enjoyed, stretching far into a still unseen horizon from which I'll look back and see that Life was good, one thing at a time. For you see, it's not enough for me that I just survive hectic weeks or check-off items from my eternal To Do List. No, I want to enjoy what I do. I want to enjoy this journey. I want to enjoy God.

And whatever needs to be tweaked within me to enjoy all that, I will tweak it.

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"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men..." ... Colossians 3:23