How I Lost and Found My Hope Today
During November and December, I’ll be diving into a personal Bible study of hope. I’ll be sharing what I learn here, in a series called “Hope for the Holidays and Everydays.“
Each week, I’ll be giving away a book. This week’s title is 21 Ways to Connect With Your Kids by Kathi Lipp, with personality assessment and applications contributed by yours truly!
Head to Kathi’s blog for some great freebie downloads: $15 Family Fun Nights, 50 Ways to Connect With Your Son, and 50 Ways to Connect With Your Daughter.
Oh, and if you haven’t already “Liked” Kathi on Facebook, I think you’ll actually LOVE her!
Enter via the Rafflecopter at the end of the blog post or click to enter here.
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I hate making mistakes.
My irritation with mistakes goes far beyond the rules of Perfectionism that I’m learning to break.
It’s a hard-wired PURSE-onality thing.
As a Driver / Choleric, I hate how inefficient mistakes make me. Doing things once is bad enough. Twice or thrice?
The end. of. the. world.
As an Expressive / Sanguine, I live in fear and loathing of all things detailed. To me, details are cleverly-disguised traps to catch me messing things up.
To spoil my joy.
To absorb every moment of my life so that I have no time for fun.
My Mistakes Today
It’s not even 10:00 AM, and today is already “one of those days.”
I’m late starting my 4th period class because I can’t find the quizzes I know I’ve copied. I search and search to no avail.
Leaving my students to snicker at my incompetence, I march back to the copy room to make new copies…only to find my quizzes sitting in the copier tray. I copied the quizzes, but neglected to take them with me.
Oh brother.
Back in class, I’m on edge. Kicking myself for not getting to school 10 minutes earlier and preventing this mistake. But I can’t turn back time, so I try to salvage it.
No use.
The harder I try, the worse things get.
I mis-spell a word on the white board, which my students are quick to point out because they know the first one to do so gets a bonus point.
Only today, I wish I’d never made that rule. I don’t want my mistakes pointed out to me. I’m sick of them, and it’s not even 10:00 AM!
I try to have a sense of humor about it.
I fail.
I see my students giving each other “She’s in one of those moods” glances. They become extra polite and quiet.
I feel even worse. They shouldn’t be taking care of me; I’m supposed to be taking care of them.
During staff meeting, I multitask, frantically trying to catch up on recording scores. My online gradebook is more than a week behind because I’ve been sick, and I’m just waiting for my boss and my students’ parents to start complaining.
I get all caught up…and then realize I’ve entered all the scores one column off. And the only way to correct them is to delete every column and start over.
Everything I’ve just spent the last 45 minutes doing was a complete waste of time.
I don’t even try to have a sense of humor about it. I’m irritated beyond words with myself.
And desperately looking for someone other than myself to blame for my mistakes.
Others’ Mistakes Today
Daniel comes home and asks me about my day. I’ve barely started to reply when he cuts me off mid-word and hijacks the conversation in an entirely different direction.
I hate being interrupted.
Today of all days.
He doesn’t even notice that I’ve gone silent.
I say nothing, because interruptions don’t bother him. And I am not in the mood for a “why are you so sensitive” lecture.
So I brood silently.
Until I get an e-mail telling me that my latest attempt to get the paperwork for my husband’s certification renewal finalized has failed.
Again.
I ordered two transcripts on October 22 — one sent to us and one sent to the office of education — and ours arrived October 24.
So I assumed the other one did, too.
Silly me: to think this paperwork nightmare could possibly be over after four months of battling with phone calls, e-mails, scans, and faxes.
I’ve. had. it.
This, is too much!
More than I should have to bear!
It’s. not. fair!
I throw myself a particularly pathetic pity party.
I Lost Hope in My PURSE-onality Weaknesses
Later, as I come back to my senses and triage my no good, very bad day, I notice a cause-and-effect pattern I’ve not seen before.
Step 1: I became frustrated with myself over one of my major PURSE-onality weaknesses: making mistakes when dealing with details.
But this wasn’t enough to cause me to bail. I persevered. I held out hope, for myself and for my day.
Step 2: Someone else made a mistake that inconvenienced me.
And BOOM, I “lost it.”
Abandoned all hope.
Dove to the depths of discouragement and despair.
Almost as if I’d been just waiting for someone else to mess up to justify my break-down.
(Almost…)
Downcast and Disturbed
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Psalm 42:5
I am downcast and disturbed because I hate my weaknesses.
I wish they would go away and leave me alone.
And then I could…
oh, I dunno…
- …be completely self-sufficient?
- …enjoy a mistake-free life?
- …need no one but my self?
- …be my own “god”?
Lost and Found
My first mistake today wasn’t losing the quizzes.
My first mistake today was misplacing my hope.
My reactions throughout the day make it painfully obvious that — once again! — I placed my hope in myself.
Which means I’d placed all sorts of expectations on myself.
Which is another way of saying I’d set myself up for (you can guess what’s coming next!) disappointment.
Oh yeah.
Almost as if I’ve been here before.
(Almost…)
So tonight, I ask:
- Why am I downcast about my mistakes?
- Why so disturbed about details?
And I am reminded
- to put my hope in God, not myself;
- to praise Him instead of piling expectations on myself;
- that He alone — not my quizzes or my students or my grades or my husband or my paperwork — is my Savior and my God.
Your Turn:
- Do you recognize the two-step pattern of (a) becoming frustrated with your own weakness and then (b) blowing up when someone else inconveniences you with the same weakness?
- Which of your own weaknesses do you find causes you to lose hope the fastest?
- Which weakness in others causes you to “lose it”?
- Anything else on your heart!
Oh, do I struggle with this! Although it took a long time for me to realize that this is what I was doing! The first step is to admit you have a problem, right? Now I guess I need to work on the rest! 🙂
THis is a daily struggle for me. I wake up, take a shower and mentally plan out my day. It rarely goes my way. Am I surprised? I shouldn’t be. I have a husband who works out of the home, a mother in law who lives with us and has dementia, and 4 kids, one who is 17 months old. Thanks for the reminder to put my trust in the only one who really has my back.
I’ve never “met” anyone so
like
me….
You’re really speaking to me, Cheri….
loud and clear.