The beginning of the school year caught me… I can’t say by surprise, because it’s not like I don’t have a calendar that’s in my hand roughly four hours a day. I knew it was coming. I even had FIRST DAY OF CC! in my calendar app weeks ahead of time. I had reached out to someone for help with planning my reading lessons. I was trying to finish. that. math. curriculum. But I also had my head so filled with all the insanity of signing up for a freelance job and then the ridiculous guilt of quitting that job that sitting down and planning anything seemed about as impossible as getting up and running a marathon.

I can tell I am overwhelmed by the length of my sentences. Well, not just the length; the quality of them. I write and speak in run-ons when my mind working against me, as if the full stop of a sentence risks me not getting the information out in time. What could happen between the breaths those end marks require? I could decide, as I often do, that the rest of what I have to say just doesn’t matter. If I pause too long I can build an entire, iron-clad case against my own reasons. My hands or my mouth may stop moving, but my mind doesn’t. When I am more relaxed, I don’t fear myself. But when I get overwhelmed, if I try to say anything in defense of my actions or feelings it must be said in those rushed run-ons with prepositions galore and barely a pause for breath — even a comma is dicey — because if I dare let myself silence myself I will.

So I have spent the past few weeks in that awful space of feeling like I need help, not sure what sort of help I need, pretty sure I don’t deserve help, thinking maybe I am being overly dramatic about my situation, certain that there is no way to express any of this to anyone without making a huge ass of myself. (Language, I know; give me a better phrase and I will use it.)

But the long and the short of it is, at the time I should have been in the thick of planning for this year’s homeschool I was instead taking long work calls and spending hours filing — not to mention the time lost of being fully in my head about the whole situation once I realized I didn’t have the hours to keep the job. And now, I am looking at yet another week of homeschool for which I feel ill-prepared to teach my children. And that’s just the basic, logistical, explainable portion of why I have spent the past few weeks under a mountain of guilt and overwhelm.

But God.

Last night, God reminded me through our weekly family singing time that God has given me everything I need already; that the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. I could hear that song every single day and still be astounded at all God has promised and provided. But then I went to church and the pastor apparently decided to preach to me directly as he spoke on God’s sovereignty. How can I believe that God is in control and still try to figure it all out myself??? There is no spreadsheet, no logical argument, no beautiful, color-coded plan that will solve a heart that doesn’t cry out to the Only Wise King for living water.

I must repent of my pride.

I have repented, though this requires some accountability now, because I know myself; I have had this same realization in different forms for the last fifteen years. I need to find someone to check in with on a regular (maybe daily) basis who can help me quickly confess and repent of the pride I am so wont to walk in. I wrote a Think List for when I can feel that crummy guilt keeping me down, but I tend to get off the path long before I feel the mud sucking at my feet. If you don’t know what a Think List is, let me show you what I scribbled down during the sermon today as a potential Think List for this “I am a failure” funk:

• There is a God and I am not Him
• His yoke is easy and His burden is light
• His commands are not burdensome
• He is close to the brokenhearted
• Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven (Psalm 32)
• Repent, rejoice, repeat

This isn’t my best Think List, but essentially it’s a list of truths to combat a lie or lies that want to choke out all the benefits of being God’s. A single verse is powerful enough to dispel any lie, but often our minds need to drown out particularly noisy lies.

I’m thinking that I don’t just need the Think List for when I feel bad; I need to spend real time dwelling on these truths and confessing/repenting quickly when I am not living them.

But again — God is good and He will not be confined to a method. He is transforming me and working on me through all this. He alone gets the glory for showing me my pride, and He alone will get the glory if by some miracle I leave this life with less of it.

In my mind, this post was really good but I think I got a unnecessarily rambley and self-reflective. I will leave it alone because I am not at a point in my life where polished writing is the goal. I just need to keep getting the words out, keep posting, because in this I might finally prove to myself that I can (however imperfectly) keep my word to myself, even when no one is asking me to do it and maybe no one benefits from this.