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January 23, 2020:

Do you ever have those mornings where you wake up and you can almost immediately tell that it should be a day of hanging out in your bed...alone...because you just know, everything will be off/go wrong?  That was my morning this morning.

If you haven't gathered by now, I absolutely detest mornings.  They're even worse when they have to start in the pitch dark - aka in the middle of the night.  I stumbled out of bed this morning and went to brush my teeth and somehow, flicked toothpaste right into my eye.  If you have ever wondered, "does toothpaste burn your eye?" well I can confidently answer "yes" to that for you.

It continued with a million inconveniences: used conditioner first instead of shampoo; forgetting stuff for the day & having to go back home; not finding a convenient parking spot and then having to wait to get out of the car because a kid was hanging out in the car beside us with his door open, oblivious of our attempts to communicate; comcast having a massive internet outage 👎

Inconveniences USED to be how I would lose my cool and spiral into a ragey tantrum.  Thankfully, God delivered me from that - but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't annoyed with how my day started.

But, these are the days though that I still either think "man, I must be doing this all on my own...no way God has arranged all this mess" or "ok God, we both know the type of person I am, I mean...you did create me...there's no need to test me to see if I've changed" 😏

All the mess continued and by the end of the day, it was trying to keep me from being excited about my mom group starting back up.  For a moment, I seriously contemplated going back home because I had had enough.  Our group is named "Struggle to Juggle" and surely I wouldn't get any judgements from them if I were absent tonight.  But, I decided that my desire to see them and connect outweighed my annoyance so I headed back down to the offices and I am SO glad I did!

We had a couple of new faces and many regulars but everyone jumped right in like we had been meeting all along.  Through a series of God-orchestrated events for many in our group, the Bible study we landed on is Trustworthy by Lysa TerKeurst.  One of the online components was finding out your Trust Score by getting one point for each 'yes' to these questions:

1. You love God, but find yourself resisting Him in some ways.
2. When your life doesn’t go as planned, you worry or try to fix things yourself.
3. You have a hard time thanking God for your trials.
4. The last time you knew God wanted you to do something, you did something else. 
5. You give God options to choose from to resolve the struggles you may have.
6. You have followed a friend’s advice about a problem before praying about it.
7. You feel a disconnect between the faith you want and the one you live out.
8. You sing and quote verses on the outside, but then still find yourself exhausted, anxious and heavily burdened on the inside.

Ya'll...number 8 is 100% me and I realized, that I am not fully trusting Him with all the cruddy inconveniences too.  I'm holding on to that like it's mine and mine alone but..I don't want it.  So, here I am God, teach me how to hand it over to you!  I pray that you reveal the work you're doing in my life and the lives of the moms in our group.  I pray that you show us how to trust you with the good & the bad and to help keep us from feeling anxious.

Psalms 111:7

"All he does is just and good, and all his commandments are trustworthy."

        *If you're looking for your tribe of moms who get the struggle and are completely real & raw in their conversations, I invite you to come hang with us & study along side of us as we walk together in our journey for The Lord.  Thursday evenings from 7-8:30PM at The Bridge's Connection Center.