Those Best Laid Plans...

I consider myself a highly adaptable person. I handle change well. Ok, there was the time when the spot where we always sit for daily Mass was roped off as reserved for several days in a row for seemingly no reason (the spot was filled with random latecomers for the first few days). So, let's just say that I normally handle change easily if I understand that there is some reason behind it. I don't even mind changes for reasons I don't completely understand, but yet accept, like day light savings time. I tease my husband because he frequently is still suffering the change two or three weeks later. "Oh come on," I say, "what's a little shift in routine?"

But today I have realized a distinction. I handle change well, as long as I am responding to a change that has happened to me, something coming in from an external source. I've mastered coping that way quite well. (Have I said that enough yet?)

What I haven't mastered is the ability to discern, plan, and implement change from the inside out. Perhaps I have even insisted, or over-emphasized, that God was calling me in a certain direction, because if I can pin the call the change on God, it is easier for me to handle. I am reminded of a 10 year old girl I knew who was being asked on a date by a boy at school. She asked her mother if it was OK to tell him "my mom won't let me" because it made her feel safer than refusing him on her own behalf.

But dear me, I'm not 10 years old. And God's life is not external to my own. (There are certain sectors of my soul which haven't gotten this memo yet.) God animates me by His Spirit to live my human life. I have long recognized the vanity in composing my own agenda and and asking God to "bless it," or take it as His own, but perhaps I have made the error on the opposite end of the pendulum -- waiting for specific orders from God about details of my life that He has entrusted to my ability to use my brain. Or somehow feeling there's no reason to change until "pushed" from the outside. And that is a lack of the use of reason.


I've tried, you see, to put myself on programs of great change and have failed miserably and repeatedly. Even as a child I struggled with my night-owlness, for example, and planned to wake early every morning, with a schedule to the 5-minute interval of what I'd do. I always set excessively high standards and desired a quick rise to perfection. Obviously, quick failure ensued. But I think these impossible goals were fueled by fear and insecurity, and I had plenty of this fuel to keep me trying again and again. Eventually, I think it is accurate to say, I developed a strong case of learned helplessness: I just can't make myself change.

But what does Christ have to say to this? What did He say into my life? Christ became my hero, bursting through the locked door or flying in through the window (or so I perceived), to bring me out of helplessness. In the last fifteen years or so, the deepest lessons I've learned have been baby-step lessons on how to stand on my own feet and walk, "by the Spirit," in what I have come to see as God's direction of leading.



But what I dug down into today, meeting as a CL Fraternity, was this thing of stumbling upon my ability to choose to change, when change is discerned as necessary, or even possibly helpful. This seems so simple it should almost be embarrassing to admit. But Jesus is concerned with restoring my humanity down to the most basic elements.

Let's take an example: meal planning. I generally decide what to make for dinner a few hours, or less, before dinner each day. I know that many highly organized women, whether by necessity or habit, plan their meals on paper two to four weeks ahead of time. I have thought to myself, boy, that's really just not me. I've thought that so much planning really would impinge on my freedom. But something in the back of my head knows that on the days when I get things ready for dinner earlier than usual, I feel freer, in fact, because I don't have that crunch time pressure to suddenly become creative, and I'm free to be with my kids, or to relax if they are otherwise occupied, in what seems to be a rough time of day for us all. I also consider that if I planned, it would be a way of showing love to my family by adding special touches of various sorts, including needing the help of my kids who like to help cook. Not to mention, I know that planning is a skill that I want my children to be able to develop.

And yet, I cling to this vision of myself as too much of a "free spirit" to plan meals. If I look intently into the vision, I see the fear: what if I fail. What if I can't do it. I fear becoming a slave to a plan, rather than using it as a tool. I fear my latent inflexibility will cause me to break when I need to tweak the plan. Ok, change IS very difficult for me!!


As an unschooler, I know need to embrace the truth that I am human, and I can learn! Moreover, I have grace, and I can grow. All of my day is given to Christ, and it is Him I serve, not a plan, and not some menacing specter demanding perfection. I can experiment! I can keep what serves me, and dismiss what blocks.

This is such a mundane thing, but I am shaking in my boots. But I know that if I tell you, my faithful blog readers, of my self-challenge, I will be far more likely to take courage and follow through.