Words of Hope

We've been feeling some stress.
Poor Riley feels the weight of a choice on her shoulders. Ultimately, the choice is not hers for where she goes to middle school, but we wanted her to shadow/tour, weigh the pros and cons, and have conversations together about how she feels about each school before we make our decision.

And while it is maybe a stressful decision, I think the most stressful thing for her is a)middle school is scary b)change is scary c)being an 11-yr-old girl is hard.

So, she's been having hard days as we're coming down to the wire on needing to make a decision.  We were all feeling the stress this morning, in every corner of the house.  Sometimes I think stress breeds stress and we all start adopting the general feel and attitudes around us.  And it followed us to the van on the way to school.  Everyone is reacting to everyone and no one is absorbing, so the explosions get bigger and more frequent.  Not fun.

It was clearly time to turn off the Christmas music and have a heart-to-heart.  Every one of us had small, underlying issues that are what ultimately cause little irritations to make us explode.  We don't always care if someone takes our saved front seat, but today we totally care because deep down our hearts are anxious over things we wish we could control.

So I preached to myself as well as the girls.  "Hey! Girls. Let's all take a deep breath.  We have to choose joy this morning.  None of this matters.  What your teacher said to you doesn't matter.  Where we go to school really doesn't matter.  What my face and weird hair looks like today doesn't matter.  Your grades don't matter.  Not really and ultimately.  Christmas is here!  Christ came!  I have you girls!  You have each other.  We can sing together and eat together and grow together.  We are rich.  We have Jesus!  All of these things are in His hands.  He has it taken care of.  We can just take some deep breaths and be thankful that none of this silly stuff upsetting us actually matters.  God is so good to us.  He's going to continue to be good in whatever He gives us."

Just saying it out loud made me believe it more.

Everyone remains silent and moody, looking out the windows as we drive to school.  Then Lola speaks up to share what she took away from my words of hope:
"Mom, why you had babies is, because you could always have the people you like."

All the moody girls laughed. :)