Dear Panic,
Would you please leave the walls of my heart this morning? All you do is sit around and stir up trouble. You know we started school last week so that we could get a jump on the school year and have several weeks to "get used to" being family of five but you don't care. You poke your head in at me when we start school each morning with bible reading... "Uh, Heidi, don't you realize you won't have two seconds to sit still to do this when Penny comes home - you'll never get it all done." Oh, would you just be quiet already Panic? You have no idea what our life will be like!
And then you tap me on the shoulder while I sit with my daughter while she labors over every sound and word in her phonics workbook. I am distracted by you for enough time to turn around and see that my daughter hasn't done a lick of school work since I turned my head... and I hear you whisper "She won't get a thing done when you have to multi-task."
I take a deep breath as Kate finishes up her school work, feeling like we have accomplished a lot in 3 hours - bible, phonics, poetry, read-alouds, shared reading, history, science, comprehension and fluency questions, math manipulatives, math worksheets, drawing, sharing, laughing, talking - and I look over at my son who needs me to figure out how to get to the "journal" section of his online science curriculum... It takes me 15 minutes to find the simple solution and you rear your ugly self up into my business again and say, "Ha! Take that Heidi. What makes you think that you can do all of this with excellence?" And then those dreaded words creep into the corners of my heart - failure, failure, failure.
Well, guess what Panic? You are NOT welcome here! Go AWAY! Because I know I will NEVER be everything to my children but that is OK. I don't want to be - Jesus is everything they need. Because when I come to the end of myself and when I recognize that I am at a total loss for how to do parenting a child from a hard place, homeschool, work outside the home in children's ministry and be a wife that consistently loves well - I know that without those things, I would not be following what God has called our family to.
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." The God of Creation has promised that to me and frankly Panic, the depths of despair that you come from have no place in His presence! Panic is just a fancy word for Fear anyway and I am determined to turn my back on that four letter word.
Now go back to the pit where you belong!
Heidi
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