Sixty days.
Here’s what they held:
Involuntary role change
Friend in need; couldn’t help
Home alone (family away for almost a week and a half)
Another friend in need; tried to help
Boss left company unexpectedly
Family’s return
Daughter left (Disney weekend trip with best friend and her family)
Friend in town; couldn’t visit
Weekend “retreat” with hubby
Daughter returned
Daughter’s playdate during heat advisory with side of injury
Daughter’s sickness
Dog’s seizure
My sickness (and navigating “calling out” with new leadership due to role shift)
Another seizure (same dog)
Company-wide event with hundreds of attendees; left early
Finding some semblance of normalcy and rhythm (yeah, right!)
Teaching small group
Teammate needed a ride to work; couldn’t help
What does this mean?
It’s an indefinite season of saying “no” to everything but survival.
As I told a friend, I feel like I could sleep for 3-4 days straight and not be caught up or released from the present exhaustion.
So when it came time to teach our ladies small group, “no” was locked and loaded. It would have been a completely reasonable, fully justified “no.”
Nobody would have blinked.
I almost took it.
Recognizing I’m in survival mode, it felt odd, even off, to teach our ladies small group at church yesterday. “Procrastinating” isn’t the right word. I put off preparing for this lesson until the days leading up to it because of all the things mentioned earlier.
Rather than bow out or request a substitute, I powered through it. After all, teaching this group of ladies is one of my all-time favorite tasks. I’m honored (and a bit surprised) each time our pastor’s wife asks me to teach our class. I always accept, and it’s humbling to be requested again.
I studied the lesson I’d prepared for the ladies, but it wasn’t until I actually delivered the talk that it hit its mark—dagger to the heart. Even though I had every excuse to be stressed out, complain, opt out of adulting—this is what it was about.
I returned to my seat after teaching, and a lady I’d never met before came over to introduce herself. Sure, I’d seen her at church before, but we’d never spoken.
“You’re a great teacher,” she said.
I almost lost it.
Apart from whatever I’d shared in the last 30-40 minutes, she knew nothing about me. Nothing. And yet, that was her response.
As I continue marinating on what the last sixty days have handed me, I keep landing in the same place:
God always gives good.
I don’t mean good as in well, an adverb.
I mean good as a noun.
Not “it went good.”
A good.
A thing.
Something gifted to me, not a description of how things turned out.
God gives what’s best for me. And most of the time, I don’t see it until it hits me in the face.
Sixty days of “no.”
And in the middle of all those “no’s,” one small, specific good, which I didn’t ask for and almost didn’t have room for.
If it touches one heart, it’s worth it.
And I know it touched my life and that of my new friend.
I still don’t know what the rest of these sixty days were for.
But I know what yesterday morning was for.
And that’s enough.
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