First, my friend at My Whit's End posted some helpful comments on the very subject I was thinking about, and second, I found a new snack at Trader Joe's yesterday:
Haw!
Years ago I watched a random TV show, and one of the characters was an extremely frazzled New Yorker - strident, argumentative, and prone to yelling. Someone had suggested that to calm himself, he find a peaceful phrase to repeat whenever his frenzy threatened to erupt.
So he dutifully made up a mantra: "Serenity now!!"
Whenever something stressed him, he repeated it over and over at higher and higher decibel levels. In the final scene, he stood in his garage, fists clenched, neck veins bulging, as a car backed away, headlights shining in his bloodshot eyes as he screamed, "SERENITY NOW!!"
Fast forward about 18 years, to last month. A friend and I were running at six a.m., talking constantly to maximize our cardiovascular benefit. (Ha.) As we jogged along, we asked one another, "Why am I so crabby and discontented all the time?"
Easy, I thought, yesterday I folded my eight millionth load of laundry, most of which was clean in the first place because some people (not the Spouse) put their clothing in the hamper rather than fold and put away. And I picked the six billionth dirty sock off the floor and it makes my skin crawl to touch dirty socks. And tomorrow I will do it again. THIS IS MY LIFE!
My friend and I vowed to get to the bottom of it.
Fast forward a month, during which I read my Bible, asked the Lord to change my thinking, lost my temper regularly at everyday, irritating stuff, and received several quiet, perfect answers to my anger in the form of memories of the verses I'd been reading. I've reached a couple preliminary conclusions.
First, I've acknowledged Jesus as my Savior for years, but never grasped fully that he is also my Lord. Philippians 2:10-11 says that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. That means everyone, whether they want to or not. Wouldn't my attitude change a bit if I just did it now? Wouldn't it change my perspective on life's mundane tasks if I behaved like a servant working for my Lord?
Second is the point that Rebecca made. I need to behave like a daughter of the King, and not a princess. A daughter of the King says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." (Luke 1:38) A daughter of the King can do boring jobs and know there's nobility in the work, and remember that this life on earth is preliminary to God's eternal purpose in his kingdom. And, she knows she has a place in that kingdom because Jesus bought her with his blood.
So as we ran again last week, and I told my friend, "Someday at the judgement seat, Jesus will thank me for doing the laundry."
"Right," she said, "And in Colossians we're told to let the peace of God rule in our heart. Oh, wait, LET?? What's let? What about my usual method of forcing things? What about my bulleted list of items that need to happen and people who need to straighten up before I can get any peace?"
We decided that the more we learn about Jesus Christ (by, of course, reading his word), the more the peace will rule, because knowing the Lord is knowing the one in control.
"Anyway, the very next verse says to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly," she said.
So there is a pretty good recipe for serenity now. Reading God's word, asking Him to help us know Christ more thoroughly, and behaving like a servant of my Lord and a daughter of the King. There isn't another circumstance where those two roles can be so compatible.
Since I began writing, I've consumed quite a lot of the Inner Peas. They're crunchy and hard to stop eating, and I promised the boys I would save them some.
