not exactly perfect

I hear everyone downstairs. They’re chatting and laughing as they eat homemade pizzas.

Not me.

I’m upstairs in the little boys’ room cleaning. I’m sorting duplos and blocks and little bricks and cars and organizing books by height. Their room was clean. I’m resorting, reorganizing, recleaning.

Sometimes I hide behind the mask of busy.

I’ll go from room to room to room looking for things to organize. Junk drawer, bucket of stuff by the dryer, desk drawers, school books, papers, and then starting over again.

Sort, throw, sort, label.

I can’t control everything.

This world, this temporary world, is simply not perfect. If it were, there’d be no death, no pain, no sorrow, no hurt, no sadness, no worry, no anxiety, no crazy hard mom days, no loss, no bad days, no spilled milk, no cancer, no celiac disease, no sick days, no none of that stuff.

It’s balance figuring out when the sorting becomes hiding and not just sorting. Or when the cleaning is about ignoring and not just cleaning. When I’m missing out on life and sweet moments? Then, then it’s time to step back and not care that there are John Deere tractors mixed in with the Thomas the Train die cast trains. Those things? They ultimately don’t matter.

The kids won’t really care that I always had them perfectly sorted.

And someday, I’ll be annoyed at myself for spending hours stressing that things weren’t put exactly where I thought they should be versus resting in the tension of living in a fallen world and still being joyful.

They’ll care that I was there with them. Laughing. Joking. Being. Finding joy.

Living life. Right now. With things on the floor and stuff not exactly perfect.

That’s real.

And that matters more.

1 Peter 5:7
Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.