After You've Hit the Wall

Here's a great little post from Don Miller's Blog on Following God and Farming. This should help you start your week well. I like what Don has to say here about partnering with God to tend the field we've been given. I like what he has to say about setting good limits.

Sometimes we moms feel like we need to do too much, be too much, and we burn ourselves out by trying to measure up to expectations that exceed our abilities. We can also become discouraged when we compare ourselves to someone else. It's a bad way to hit the wall in winter, crumpled up against life's hard realities with our own dreams of what we might be crushed up against us.

But the crash itself is a good place to start, believe it or not, to find the life we long for. Any ending can become a good beginning. The end of something is always where we have to start from to begin again.

I'm not saying we should aim low. I'm not saying we can't strive for excellence. On the contrary, I think striving for excellence is very satisfying and it honors God. But we need to understand and apply the principle of partnering with God to do our work. We need to begin to see our work as a collaboration, rather than a lone enterprise.

Our abilities, or the lack of them, should only be a guide to how to manage ourselves. They do not need to determine whether we should homeschool. They help us distinguish between the places where we will need to bring in additional resources and the things we can do best ourselves.

So today, read Don Miller's post, and think about how it applies to you. If you're looking for a good winter read, a light book that is refreshing and uplifting, I recommend his A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. You'll find my review of it on The Moonboat Cafe today.