Our Holy Chaos

  This article is part of a series on finding peace in everyday chaos. It may be better to start from the beginning . It was time to tell my boss the truth. We were a few days away from deploying a major architecture change that was the result of months of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment. My team was responsible for the user interface, the parts that everyone would see. We weren’t ready. Issue after issue had been uncovered and addressed. Each fix opened the door for more bugs. We were being crushed under the weight of my snap decisions to simply survive the latest crisis. I had tried to be a hero. I had tried to shield other teams from challenges that were “our problem” and now I had a choice: release a project I didn’t believe was ready or get help. I remember the feeling of weight being lifted from my shoulders as I walked through the situation with my boss and other stakeholders. We got the project back on track and while some features were delayed we ...

This article is part of a series on finding peace in everyday chaos. It may be better to start from the beginning . Two things caught my eye as I came into the kitchen: A bag of frozen pizza rolls sitting on the counter and a teenager with an empty plate playing on their phone nearby. Annoyance was immediate. Why didn’t they put the rest of the pizza rolls away? Did they want to waste the whole bag? Did they think wasting them was fine because the magical Pizza Roll Fairy would just get more? I still remember the look on my child’s face when I picked up the half-empty bag of food, threw it in the freezer, slammed the door, and stormed away with a snide remark about how they were welcome to waste their groceries when they went off to college. My self-righteous anger quickly turned into shocked self-loathing. Why did such a trivial event upset me so much? Why was my peace so fragile? Reflecting on–and apologizing for–my reactions like this led to the next step of finding peace in everyda...

  (Disclaimer: This will be a blog post that is fully personal and I plan to be quite vulnerable with you all. This is about our faith journey and what we have learned...so here goes!)      How many of you are like me?  Every morning I wake up and one of the first things I do is step on the scale.  I have been told by many that this is a healthy habit..."If you want to stay on top of your weight, weigh yourself every day!"  However, even healthy habits can become seriously unhealthy...especially when your me!  I have a tendency to take things a bit to far.  I can get extreme.  For me, the number that reflects back to me each morning represents how my day is going to go.  If the number is down, I'm happy and spend very little time thinking about my weight the rest of the day.  If the number is up, I become angry and frustrated.  I feel unlovable and I berate myself all day long.  This is not an exaggeration...this is s...

It became obvious that I was wasting my time. I was impatiently waiting for my wife and kids to be available for something that I’d been looking forward to most of the day. I wanted to play a new board game (because I’m a nerd). That needed to be returned to the library soon (because I’m cheap). However, homework and lesson plans gave way to phones and books. Everyone was exhausted and wanted to relax. I spent the evening sulking like a typical middle-aged man. Ok, it may not have been as traumatizing as I’m making it sound, but it did get me thinking. Recently, I wrote that the first step to reclaim our day from chaos , challenges, and disappointments is to visualize success. I assumed I knew what I was talking about–which was a mistake–and that I knew perfectly well what success looks like. But, I didn’t. As I reflected on the way I tend to respond when things don’t go as I plan, I struggled to define what “ideal” would have looked like. I started with condemning feeling sorry for my...

  “Special needs?”   What does that even mean?   According the very credible source of Wikipedia ( 😊 ) the term, “special needs” describes individuals who require assistance for disabilities that may be medical, mental, or psychological.   A little over six years ago, my journey as a “special needs” mama began.   God called our family to adopt a child with Down Syndrome.   I had a decent understanding of what an individual with Down Syndrome was capable of as I had worked with adults with Down Syndrome, helping them live independent lives, while I was in college.   However, I devoured every book I could on what a Down Syndrome diagnosis meant and what kinds of things I could expect.   In July of 2017, my three-year-old son with Down Syndrome was placed in my arms from the orphanage liaison and I was given a bag of formula and the clothes on his back with no explanation of what to expect of his behaviors.   My husband and I went back to o...

"Honey, have you talked to the insurance guy yet?" I snapped that I hadn't reached out. How could I have? I was way too busy to even think about that! To be fair, more than a week had passed since I said I would call. I wasn’t annoyed with my wife for asking. I was frustrated with myself for dropping the ball… again! The cycle of being too busy to get anything done is brutal. Feeling behind leads to feeling stressed. Stress makes it harder to deal with difficult or unpleasant responsibilities. Not dealing with these things inevitably ends with them becoming urgent, which makes us feel more behind and more stressed. This is the first installment of a series of articles about finding peace amid everyday chaos. Breaking this cycle is a work in progress for me. I have good days and bad days, but want to share what’s been helpful so far. For a long time, I tried to find peace by changing my situation, trying to free up my schedule, and setting high expectations for the next va...

  In the waiting…God is working!!!   Has anyone else ever had to wait for something they really wanted, and it seemed to take forever? Maybe it was in the supermarket line when you just wanted to get home!   How about after school when your child seems to take forever to get out of the building?   What about when you just want a prayer answered?   Waiting is not something I am good at, how about you? From the time I was little I remember confessing my sin of impatience…spoiler alert, I still confess this sin.   The mantra I heard from my parents, especially my mom was, “patience is a virtue!” I pray for this virtue daily, and guess what?   God gives me ceaseless opportunities to grow in patience, and I fail daily!  My inability to be patient is something that truly drives me crazy about myself!   As I reflect on the virtue of patience, I realize just how impatient I have been in the past, how much I have changed recently, and where I ho...