Trudging Along

My boys are spread apart in age which means that we are in year 11 of high school.  Eleven straight years of high school with absolutely no break.

Eleven.

Seriously, they should name a building after us.  

We've sat through (and continue to sit through) all their activities...choir and band and theater and basketball and football and the principal's office.

My boys are nothing if not normal.

=0)

Sunday was the youngest shrubs basketball banquet...the 7th one for us.  The best part of this one?  He was called by HIS name and not his brothers...it is so hard following big brothers.  

Poor Brian...he dreamed of making the basketball team (not easy at our school) and he did, only to find his brothers name in the yearbook instead of his own.  He got an award at last years banquet where the coach spent the whole speech comparing him to his older brother...it's all ok though, our middle boy was often compared to his academically unchallenged older brother, too. 

The cycle of life.

I guess it's all part of our story...either we're always compared to someone else or we're comparing ourselves to someone else.  It's somewhat exhausting if you ask me yet I do it all the time to myself.

There's always someone who is thinner or richer or less wrinkly or has perfect children who pick up their own laundry and clean up after themselves or drive nicer cars or pay way less for car insurance or who get better internet connectivity in their very own little house on their little street.  

I know it's a current stronghold I'm dealing with and a side effect of this disconnect I'm feeling in my own spiritual walk.  This comparison to others thing.  It's like a skip in a record...it just keeps repeating itself over and over and over again.  The whole little voice that says 'you're not good enough, you're not doing enough' mentality that goes against everything I know and believe.

Sigh.

It's exhausting.

I know this is a season and I'm trudging along holding on to that thought.  I know the footprints in the sand right now show only one set of prints....I know I'm being carried ever so gently.  It's so interesting...there is no major event happening right now or anything, just lots of changes and unknowns but I think that's just enough to throw me off balance.

But strangely enough, I have this overwhelming sense of peace as well.  This sense that 'this too shall pass'.  This is a big time in the history of Jesus, too...only he knew what was going to happen.  That love...oh, that love.