A Lesson From My Boys

I cleaned my boys’ room yesterday.  Three garbage bags of trash, a big box of winter clothes, a giant box of costumes and two bins of legos hauled out just to find the floor.  I expected tears and complaints at the loss of their toys and favorite playthings.  I got, instead, relief.  They were so happy to find a room which was suddenly manageable for them.  The mess which had made me crazy and their father a lunatic, was truly beyond their capability to clean.

I had considered myself a benevolent dictator who allowed them to keep all they possessed as long as they kept it the way I wanted it kept.  They were drowning under the weight of the responsibility and didn’t know how to ask for help.  My trash-purging tirade was not the punishment I had feared it would be, but was an act of mercy and a release.

How many times have I found myself in that same position in my own life?  Weighted down by responsibilities and exhausted by the weight of the burdens I shoulder.  They wear on me and wear me out.  They are the source of my mental fatigue at the end of every day.  These useless pointless, and truly unwanted, burdens.  I keep asking for God to give me the strength to carry them all, the ability to do everything, be everywhere, and live up to an unrealistic vision of success.  I am like my own children; they have learned it from me, this never-give-in attitude.  This unwillingness to admit defeat even when it becomes so apparent to everyone else.

I am asking for the wrong things.  I do not need more strength and greater ability.  I need fewer burdens and greater humility.  I need to learn to admit that I can not and do not want to do it all.  I need to ask my Heavenly Father to come in with His trash bags and clear out the garbage and the unnecessary which are weighing down my life.  I need to follow the example of my own sweet sons and learn to revel in the freedom which is mine if only I can learn to let God take out the trash.