First World Problems
By Saturday night, I wanted nothing more to cry over a pint of cookie dough ice cream while soaking away my feelings away in an overflowing bubble bath.
It had been one of those weeks.
Nothing life-threatening. Nothing permanent. Nothing even life-altering.
Just a towering stack of frustrations, interruptions, irritations, and disappointments.
In simple words, a week full of first world problems.
I lamented to my husband, who lay ill with a low-grade fever in our bed, about my sorrows. Allowing my immature perspective to take the upper hand, I found the greatest root of my frustration to be the one and only thing I could actually change.
Me.
It is so easy to be blind-sided by the small things of life. The inconveniences of negative experiences, unwelcomed ailments, disrupted plans, and unmet expectations. To feel wronged or robbed or simply let down. And yet in comparison, these issues are all temporal, and we know that. But its these very momentary frustrations that quickly mount, threatening to smother us in the process.
A week later, I peered out the living room window and witnessed the wind whipping the decaying leaves off the towering pecan tree in my backyard. Some tumbled to the ground, others were sent spiraling in a thousand different directions.
The branches danced in tandem with the gusts, surrendering their fruit the elements rather than resisting the inevitable change. They couldn’t stop the wind, change the weather, skip the season, or even move themselves to a new location. But if they didn’t bend and give way, they’d snap from the security of the trunk. The mighty trunk that was keeping them alive because of its deep and powerful roots.
Do you feel like you’re about to snap, my friend? That the mounting pressure is simply whipping the life out of you, one little leaf at a time.
Maybe it’s not big stuff. Maybe, like me, it’s just a compilation of small things. One refining moment after another, one gust of wind after the next.
It is not wasted work, my friend. The winds of change. The refining flames of the fire. God is preparing you for the next season. Maturing you, and growing you, if you’ll choose to surrender and not resist.
Because, truth is, you can endure it. Not because you’re strong and capable, but because you are being kept by Him. He his holding you up, holding you on, and His strength will sustain you through it.
“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” - Colossians 2:6-7
