The Trap.....

Yesterday was my "day off". So, I got and up and got the kids off to school. By the time I got them all out the door I had just under two hours until I had to be at the school with our turtles for show and tell. As I walked around the empty house all I could see was all that frustrated me about our home. 

We had carpet laid in our room earlier in the week. The after effects were still quite visible....most of the contents of our bedroom (with the exception of the furniture) was still in our dining room. My laundry room looked like a clothes volcano had erupted in it. There were piles of clean clothes that had been washed, dried and folded covering the tops of the washer and dryer. Piles of clothes that needed to be hung up lying over the back of the office chair which sat in front of the desk you could not see due to the basket of laundry that had not been folded that was sitting on top of it. As I made my way out the door to the school I noticed again the pile of carpet scraps and carpet roll the carpet layers left on our porch right next to the hole in the porch floor due to a broken board. The feeling of inadequacy was mounting.

I made my rounds with the turtles to each of the kid's classrooms, picked Jake up from pre-school, dropped the turtles back off at home and dropped Jake of with his dad. Each Friday I help in Hunter's class with centers. Before we began centers Hunter's teacher informed me of an upcoming meeting to discuss Hunter and the possibility of retaining him in kindergarten next year. REALLY???? I spent the rest of my time in the classroom looking around at the other kindergartner's and assessing their academic skills against Hunter's. By the time I left the school and met my husband and Jake at McDonald's play place for lunch I was in an emotional pit.

I was asking myself..... "what is the matter with you?" "why can't you raise "smart" kids?" "why can't you keep up with your housework and laundry?" I began to think of many of the other mom's I knew who had clean homes, laundry caught up and put away. I thought of my friends who's kids were reading with much more success than my boys. I was on an emotional downward spiral.

I then remembered a friend's post on facebook I had read earlier that day. "Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load." Galatians 6: 4-5.  "Without comparing himself to somebody else..."

Wow! What a trap I had been caught in. That was exactly what I was doing and had been doing for quite sometime. I started thinking of all the things that I compared: my house, my job, my church, my children, my weight, my appearance, my marriage. Not that I did it everyday, but the days I already felt bad about my situation for whatever reason, I would start to look around at others around me and begin comparing.

First of all, comparisons are never accurate. Things always look better from the outside but, the truth is EVERYONE has their own set of issues. Second, I realized that in comparing myself and my life with others I was not thanking God for what He has given me. He has given me a load to carry....unlike anyone else's load so, no comparison would be fair.