Tag Archives: personal growth

The season sets the standard

I am terrible at being a sick person.

It’s not that I’m an awful patient, with a little bell at my bedside to communicate my constant requests for hot lemon drinks and more tissues (honestly, I prefer to be left alone). It’s more that I have a hard time of letting myself be sick.

Instead, I tend to try my best to just keep going at the normal pace and get the things done. Although inevitably I don’t get the things done very well, I’m grouchy, and occasionally the weariness means I do some very silly things – for example, this week I accidentally stuck my fingers in the ceiling fan while leaning out from the stairs to gesture at my mother. Yes, it hurt; no, I did not chop my fingers off (the kids were surprised).

Why not just snuggle up in bed and let the world pass me by until I’m better? Well, four kids… enough said. But that’s just a cover, really the issue is that I struggle to switch to the mode of sick person.

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When God isn’t who you thought He was.

Some mornings over breakfast the girls and I look at my phone together. There are two types of things we look at: it’s either that week’s celebrity best & worst dressed (don’t judge me), OR it’s bible study… maybe they balance each other out?

The bible reading app I’m currently using, Read Scripture, occasionally has videos that go with it. While they’re certainly not aimed at kids, they are a MOVING IMAGE, and therefore my children must each watch them in turn.

A couple of weeks ago I was starting the book of Mark, and the overview video hit home as it explained the disciples’ confusion around who Jesus was. Yes he’s the Messiah, they got that, but the Messiah they were expecting was a victorious military leader who would set them free from Roman oppression. However, the Messiah they got was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, and that just did not compute.

Sometimes the God you get is different to the God you were expecting, because sometimes God just isn’t who you thought he was.

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Working at being lazy

I hate being lazy. If you ever accused me of being lazy I would react like a crazy person: I’d launch into some serious defensive behaviour and recite a long list of things to beat back your accusation until you agreed with me that I am, if anything, the exact opposite of lazy.

No one has ever actually called me lazy, probably because they can intuit that might be my response, and they love their life.

I think maybe I have a problem here. In fact, I know I do. Feeling lazy is for me an “Unbearable Feeling” (this is a term from Dave Riddell, and the concept is so fruitful, read more here), or as a counsellor recently called it an “emotional allergy”.*

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On Monarchs and metamorphosis

This summer my two eldest daughters (Miss 11 and Miss 8, I’m yet to choose them fancy semi-anonymous blogger children aliases) ran a fairly successful small business. The year before one of them had been raising monarch butterfly caterpillars on a swan plant, and when the caterpillars literally ate themselves out of house and home she had to buy another swan plant. It was not easy to find, and it was not cheap. I could tell she was scheming something when she asked, “Mum, do you think we could grow swan plants in the greenhouse?”. We talked through outlay and expenses, marketing and selling points, and their eyes grew wide as they did the math and calculated the profit they could make on each plant. When your pocket money comes in gold coins, even $40 seems like a fortune.

And so in early November I advanced them a loan for seeds and potting mix, and they got to work. Well, WE got to work; there was a fair bit of parental input at the beginning, seeing how they’re not really proficient plantswomen at this young age. There were quite a few weeks of effort invested with little return, but it soon came time to sell them, and they sold easily. Again, I had to help out a bit here, seeing how, again, they’re not on Facebook Marketplace at this young age, nor can they drive, and their bookkeeping needed some assistance. But they bartered cleaning chores for my services and we were all happy. Happy customers, happy caterpillars, happy mum at providing such a great teaching experience (yes, I’m impressed with myself too), and happy daughters when they made over $100 each.

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