When You Fall Off

Sometimes living abroad feels like a rodeo.

More specifically, it feels like riding in a ring on a wild bronco. Some days I’m sitting nice and pretty, wowing onlookers with my seat and confidant smile, and some days that horse is bucking so wildly that my seat, my grip, my scraggly hair, it all just gives up the fight and falls down into the dust.

Today has been one of those rolling-in-the-dust-days, covering my face with the brim of my hat and slinking off into the barn.  I had thought I’d take time to worship with my two littles, read a story of Jesus and then do some coloring while daddy was gone most of the day. But instead of planning it I woke up late after a late night to bed, I scrambled after the mess of breakfast and kid toys and dried-out plants that was already there before realizing the morning was almost over.

Then we listened to a couple stories on CD as we sort of colored and sort of did some stamping and then my daughter broke a glass on the tiles (the third one this week) and my son wandered off to play legos and then we sort managed to have a lunch of carrot sticks and hot dogs. And then an attempt to take the trash outside turned into my landlady yelling up at me through the stairwell for all to hear and me ignoring it to chase my gleefully naked 3-year-old back into the house. And she wouldn’t nap. And neither would he.

Finally at 2pm my husband walks in the door hungry and excited to see us (bless his heart) and I am a panicky, sweaty mess in a 90-degree-kitchen helping my son make cookies (which he then realizes he doesn’t like!), and I tell my husband, “Find yourself some food cuz I’m not cooking!!”

And all of this chaotic, rather lackluster mothering and wife-ing on my part is followed by my incredibly grace-filled husband encouraging me to take a cup of coffee to my room and journal until I come out the calmer, happier version of myself.

Yup. That was my day, folks. And its not the first time. This rodeo rider sure does fall off in rather spectacular fashion sometimes.

So I sit by my bedroom window staring at my perky little pothos plants, blasting the AC, sipping cashew coffee (my new favorite- recipe here), drawing a blue plastic bucket bath full of essential oils, and thinking about how deep and wide is God’s grace shown through my husband, my plants, through air conditioning and coffee and essential oils. Thinking I don’t deserve this break. Thinking I should have done this or that better. Thinking that lately many days have been pretty great, but some days I fall off the horse.  And that’s just part of it.

I’m grateful for a marriage that’s full of apologies and forgiveness. Full of grace and space when we need it. Full of permission to each be ourselves, entirely different from one another. Because man, do we need grace.

A passage I have been meditating on lately is this, from Micah chapter 6:

“Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal,

that you my know the righteous acts of the Lord.” 

I’ve been dwelling on the fact that God encouraged the Israelite sojourners to remember their journey– not to regret it or ignore it– but to take time to remember where God had brought them and all that He had done for them — so that they would know His righteous acts.

Sometimes knowing how good and present God is requires taking time to remember our journey.  And when we fall disastrously off that horse we can remember how far he has brought us and how much has changed.

We can remember how today’s fall was astonishingly better than the falls of a year or two ago. And that, my friends, is progress.