The New Year, Crawling, and the Rest of Us

Our little six month old is in the desperate and determined process of learning to crawl. He has been for some time now. About two months ago he would look at something he wanted and do this wild, frenetic Pilates type air swimming. Now that he’s done all that great core work, he’s stronger and can easily get up on all fours, do a full plank, crawl in circles and backwards, but he has yet to master the whole going forward thing. Which is incredibly frustrating to him. And I totally get it.

As the New Year rolls around and the blogosphere is filled with posts about achieving your goals it’s easy to survey your life and feel like you are just crawling around in circles or ooching backwards further and further.

I made my list of 2015 goals. Some of them were wise and reasonable… others, well, the verdict is still out. The year is young. As a new mom I’m still trying to get my groove down. (And as I write that, I internally brace for the mommy guilt comments of “why-aren’t-you-all-together-like-I-am” and then I slap myself around for letting those comments get to me and leak through into my writing… and if I keep letting you in on my internal dialogue it’s only going to get messier, so I better stop now!) And I feel like I’m crawling in circles and pushing backwards instead of forwards. But the Lord has pressed a new measuring stick into my hands for this season that, when I use it, frees me up from the rat-race of trying to achieve.

For this season, I feel like the Lord keeps reminding me that diligence is the goal, rather than check marks on a list. Proverbs 12:27 says, “But the precious possession of a man is diligence.” The precious possession of a mom is diligence. Not all her ducks in a row. But diligence is what is her precious possession. So I’m striving to be faithfully diligent.

I’m a pastor’s wife, mom, sister, daughter, friend, women’s ministry director, writer, homemaker, and on occasions now less common I’m a photographer and musician. And each part of me has a list a mile long of improvements and tasks to be busy about. There’s no way I can be “successful” in all these arenas in a day, a week, or a month. So the best I can be is diligent. And diligent makes room for all the crawling in circles and ooching backwards it takes to finally move forward.

May your 2015 be filled with much forward movement, but most of all with the freedom that comes from laying your head on the pillow each night and finding satisfaction that God graced you with the ability to be diligent yet another day.

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