I'm Just in the Way

I often find myself disappointed and discontent.  I just spent an entire year studying contentment using Calm My Anxious Heart: A Woman's Guide to Finding Contentment.  Great book, by the way.  She really emphasizes that my failure to set my eyes on things above is leading me to discontentment.  So true.  It's very easy to do in the busyness of life:  keeping house, teaching kids, ministering through MOPS and at church, rinse, repeat.

I don't know how to correct this failure in myself other than reading my Bible and praying.  Even making myself busy at church doesn't necessarily mean that I am focusing on God, and not on myself.  Lately I am doing it on autopilot.

I find myself frustrated by this answer, like it isn't somehow going to work.  I haven't made any time for reading my Bible in a long time.  I have been praying almost every day, but my prayer life really is suffering and I know it.

I have also noticed that my expectations are often WAY too high.  I am a perfectionist.  Not that I will work at something until it's perfect, but that I have a vision of how it should be and if it isn't that way, then (a) I won't even make an attempt so as to avoid failure or (b) I'll be miserable because it's WRONG.  See, that is just expectation.  Someone wise once told me that if I use the word "should" a lot, especially about myself, it means I am expecting way too much.  I have high expectations of myself that I can never realize, and so I am disappointed in myself, frustrated, and discontent.

In this scenario, it's all about me.

There's where I've gone wrong.  I'm focusing on self.  What can I accomplish?  How can I change?  Instead, I need to focus on God, which would turn my questions into:  What can God accomplish through me?  How will God change me?  How can God be glorified through me?

I think that is exactly how I want to pray.  I know that I am called to be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let my requests be made to God.  There's the answer.  I have to share my heart and soul with God (even though he knows, he likes to hear).  I have to pray about my needs.  And do all of if with thanksgiving.  It turns out that time with God really is the answer.

I really over complicate things sometimes.