On Discernment

Change is hard.  But you know what’s sometimes harder?  Making the decision to change.  To mindfully, purposefully, set your mind towards doing something different.  Because a decision to change most often also means taking a chance.  Which means we might just fail.  And if you’re like me, failure is scary.  We live in a world where our failures can come to define us.  Sure, our successes define us, too, but no one seems to remember our victories quite so well as our less-than-victories.

Why then, would we ever move out of the safety, the relative peace of the status-quo? For me, the answer is usually starts with a whisper.  A whisper in my ear that I’m doing well, but I can do better.  That I should do better.  My all-too-human response is, at time, “No, I couldn’t possibly.” Then the whisper quiets for a few days.  Then it come back, raising it’s voice just a bit.  Again, I beg off. By the time this whisper becomes a dull roar, I get really defensive and say once and for all, “No, really, I can’t.” And that, friends, is when God steps in and says, “Perfect.  I’ll do all the work. All you have to do is agree.” This is what discernment looks like for me.  It took me a while to figure out that was what’s happening.  After all, I wasn’t such a willing participant.  But the more I open my ears to God’s plan for me (however crazy it might seem), the easier I find this whole “life” business. Because if you’re really listening… you can’t fail.

And so here I am, writing a blog about faith, motherhood, marriage, poetry, food, and all the other things I thought I couldn’t really write about.