Mom TipTuesday: Do Something while You Are Waiting

     I am a failure of the typical "To-Do List".  You see, more and more, I am finding that I am a rebel at heart. I loved, loved, loved, making that list. It was a good, comprehensive, impactful list.  Yet, day after day, I would do everything EXCEPT what was on the list.  One day, a couple of year's ago, I ran across a Bible verse* that spoke to the reason I would not do what was on the list.  It explained the reason that when you tell your kids, "Do not eat up all the chips." --you are, more or less, instantly out of chips.  For the rest of your life. It just doesn't occur to us how much we need to do a thing until someone/thing tells us we can't.  Or how badly we hate a thing until someone tells us we must.  So it was, with the list and me.  Whatever the list said, "Do," I wouldn't.  Sometimes I got a lot done in spite of my list, but as long as something was an item on my list-- "NO WHAY."**
      I didn't connect it with my list right away.  Initially, I thought it was just for big stuff like coveting my neighbor's wardrobe or her haircut or her McMansion or her metabolism or her vacation or her kid's academic records.  Or really REALLY BIG stuff (murder, extortion, perjury, insider trading)that generally didn't apply to me.
      Dull little me.  Brown hair, brown eyes, 5'4", 136.8.  Average girl and my @#$%& list.  I am the rebel's rebel.  I am not in it for impact or to "get" someone else or even for a thrill.  I declined to do things like bathe the dogs or run to the hardware store for painting tape.  No one knows but me.  It was just the fact of refusing to do as I was asked.   It has taken me another few years to read the rest of the passage where it tells me how this works and why I am free from it(easier said than done, to be sure).

     But now life puts me in a situation where I have A LOT of time on my hands.

Here is where the list comes in.  I could waste a lot of time sitting around(and I have). You are probably waiting for something, too... Your kids to start school?  Time to go to the grocery and get more chips?  The ER to call your kids name?  Weather warm enough to go out in your summer clothes?  To deliver your baby?

I found life passing me by while I waited for my dreams to come true.  If tomorrow never comes, did I live today?  There is nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing I can do to speed up this adoption process.  Most people's is going faster than mine (if the yahoo group is any indication at all).  We have lost time while we waited for life to begin and I was having a hard time figuring out how to organize my thoughts about what it was we could do, what I thought we ought to do, and what I wanted to do that I needed to hunt up affordable opportunities to make happen.

Then it occurred to me.  What I need is a list.

If you are not waiting now, you will be soon.  Even the gals who are over in China to bring their children home, find themselves waiting most of the time they are away from home.  Waiting for planes, waiting to meet, waiting for exams, waiting for appointments.  The biggest wait of all the 12 to 14 hour plane ride on both ends of the fun.

Make a list, check it twice, carry a good book wherever you go.  Stare down the wait.  Using your time wisely doesn't mean being a crazy, type A, who does stock trades on her fancy phone at midnight and sends all her meeting notes from her airplane seat before take off.  It means that you are mindful of what you can do so that the moments of life that matter are not lost while you wait for the grand events of the few and far between.

Let me tip you off: it doesn't have to be a "bucket list".  It can be a list of things that you can do for free without leaving your house.  You don't need to climb the Himalayas to make the most of your life.  You just need to believe that what you can do is what you should do.

1. I will teach my kids to play cards.
2. I will learn the names of the people who walk their dogs past my house.
3. I will offer my doula card to the pregnant ladies in Target.
4. I will cook dinner for my neighbor who is single.
5. I will plan a salon day for the girls and I at the beauty college.
6.I will open all the windows and turn up the radio and make iced tea and cook a slab of red meat and put on make up for when my husband comes home from his "suckful" day's work.
7. I will stay up all night and make a list for the ladies, so they learn to escape the time wasting ways of their mom.

Pay careful attention, 

then, to how you walk--not as unwise people,

but as wise--making them most of the time 

because the days are evil.  Ephesians 5:15,16






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*Romans 7:7,8 says What should we say then?  Is the law sin?  Absolutely not!  On the contrary, I would not have known sin if it were not for the law.  For example I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said You shall not covet.  And sin seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind.  For apart from the law, sin is dead.

**El Esqueleto.