If You're Happy And You Know It.....
“If your happy and you know if clap your hands! If your happy and you know if clap your hands! If you're happy and you know it then your face will surely show it, if you’re happy and you know if clap your hands!”
-This is my Elsie’s anthem as Saturday morning lifts its very bright eyes .
It’s 5am…….. I’m determined to wake up before the kids and finish a blog post because the last few weeks have been crazy, writing felt impossible, and I just needed a bit of quiet in the dark before the sun came up. (let's be honest, usually that means re-falling asleep on the couch with a book or computer in my lap - but at least it wasn’t for lack of effort).
This morning, I wake up to Elsie next to us in our bed. We’ve been trying to take her back to her own bed at night for multiple reasons and to no avail.. Also, we have a queen sized bed, and well, if we decided to embrace any form of continued co-sleeping, we’d need to invest in a King, cuz, I’d like to NOT wake up with black eyes from feet to the face on a regular basis. (Update: Since I wrote this post, we have invested in that king size bed and are sleeping beautifully)
So, I attempt to do my sneaky mom thing, roll her into my arms and roll her out of my arms back into her own bed - only to have her do what all sweet little determined snugglers do - pop up and cry out, “I want to be with YOUUUUUUU!”. Soooooooo, She is currently sitting next to me as I type, yawning and describing to me how tired she is …….
This week has been a mental battlefield. Sometimes its not good to go to certain kinds of battlefields. Sometimes, there are certain battles that just aren't healthy to engage in, ya know what I mean? I need to cut those battle short and move on (overthinking on a mental battle field doesn’t often end well! ). With that said, sometimes the battle is worth my time as I fight through priorities, the why behind what we do, and the figure out the how behind it.
I’m finding the more we do LIFE (for us it's the homeschooling, parenting, married-ness, music, ministry, and all the stuff in between) the messier the mental mind games can become if I don’t keep them in check. Life tends to keep getting more complicated because there are just more moving parts. The more moving parts, the more managing of those parts. The managing of moving parts is a tricky business, because we can’t control all those moving parts.
We CAN control what is in our hands to control, everything else, my friends, we gotta let it go.
Side note, Elsie is now making her own bed on the living room floor. She just informed me that she locked the door to her brother’s room (Elijah’s) so that he wouldn’t wake up, come out, and tackle her while she was trying to sleep in her newly made makeshift living room bed…..
...We ARE responsible for US, ourselves. We ARE commissioned to do two basic things 1). Love God. 2) Love people.
Now, where we get into trouble is when we try to be responsible for how OTHER people love God and love people. I’m tellin ya, tryin to control what is not in your hands to control (like how other people treat other people ) is a slippery slope! We CAN control what we do and how we treat the people around us. We CAN control our thoughts and emotions towards others. We CAN control how we choose to face the day. I’m not saying its easy, BUT I can tell ya from experience that easy is not always better and doing the hard things is not bad!
“Easy is not better and hard is not bad”
- Heather Avis
So my encouragement to you today is this, Choose how you view and act towards the day in front of you("if you're happy and and ya know it clap your hands!") and the people who come with it. Then, Let the rest of it all fall away. The weight of the world isn’t yours to carry (pretty sure someone else in particular already did that). I might just take a note from Elsie’s page of “how to be Elsie at 5 am on a Saturday morning” and sing “if you’re happy and you know it…” cuz it often starts with a shift in perspective to get us going in the right direction
Be brave enough to make the shift.
YOU GOT THIS