fruit on the hard days

even tough days have highlights — we stopped to take selfies by this colorful wall near our house.

Today was....uhhhhhm, it was hard. It has always been really challenging for me to hold his needs and my needs at the same time. Especially because, if I’m going to be real with you, I am just now at a point in my life where I am getting acquainted with my own needs.

Hmm, you might be thinking, like I often do, not the best timing, to awaken to your own needs right at the moment you have a person depending on you to meet a majority of their needs. Not. Great.

Or isn’t it?

Maybe if not for this seemingly poor timing, I wouldn’t have been led to so firmly believe that the best thing I can do for him is to tend to my own soul. (Sincere thanks to my therapist and the Holy Spirit for this guidance). Maybe I wouldn’t be so aware of the opportunity given me to model for him how to care for his own soul by demonstrating proper tending to my own. Maybe there is actually so much purpose in this timing, I begin to think.

And I’m sure that there is, I know that there is. But even so, this doesn’t affect immediate change on days like today, which are so difficult precisely because I can see just how much my soul needs tending to and exactly because I feel ill-equipped to meet it. Nothing makes you feel more boxed in than knowing exactly what you need to do and feeling powerless to do it. 

What I know now (and what I did not know a year ago -- thanks be to God for that growth) is that this means I need to ask for more help. I’m still very much working on the step between knowing I need help and actually getting help. That step is disproportionately huge if you ask me. Plus I come from a long line of very resourceful DIYers and this lineage is wonderful in many ways except for in this one way: asking for help is so dang hard. 

And yet...

I can’t help but to pause and reflect, and even rejoice, because I know that this is just another area rife with opportunities to be stretched and grown, to do things before I feel ready to do them. Just like a year ago when I was pushed further than I wanted to go, because of that, I’m more adaptable now. I am deeply, truly grateful for that...especially now that I can see the harvest of that labor with my own eyes. It’s so much easier to keep hoping when our hope has borne some fruit. 

Thanks be to God for fruit, thanks be to God for memories of it on the hard days.

May I, and you, reap a big ol’ harvest one day from the field called “getting the help you need, when you need it”. I am an unlikely candidate but then, I always have been -- it’s all grace + more grace.