What to do?

It is Saturday. The FUN day of the week. It has been a lonnnng day. The kids are hungry. Your husband will soon be home after running errands.

You just got all the kids bathed after they went out to play in the mud while you were on the phone. Mud is everywhere. Even on your tan bedroom rug!

And now the dog has dragged the trash out of the kitchen garbage can. It is now in the living room. What a slimy mess!
You have no idea WHAT to serve for dinner. You are tired and angry! And extremely frustrated! Weary.

You have 2 options when your day goes “south”.

The first is a default reaction. Something bad happens. You take it personally and you yell. And you keep on yelling until every kid is sitting still on the couch, scared into silence.

You feel like a failure because you took it out on the kids. You feel like a failure because you didn’t think of dinner earlier and have it already cooking in the crock pot.

You feel bad because you want to just walk away and let your husband deal with it all.

This happens all the time to moms.

It is a daily occurrence. The specific details are different each day, but the general idea is the same. NOTHING has gone the way you hoped. Life is hard. Stuff happens.

We have been learning about changing the way we look at the circumstances of our life. We have been learning the two different LIFE formulas. The path to frustration vs.
the path to joy and peace

What would you do?

Abigail (name changed, of course) often has a day like that. We have been working together to help her to have a more consistently loving reaction to life in a house full of healthy active children. Abigail has an anger problem. Her first and immediate reaction to her children’s child-like-ness is anger. And her husband has no idea how to comfort her! Because of her default to anger, he would find something to keep him busy in the garage until she cooled down.

Before she learned she had a CHOICE, her normal default reaction to a day like that would have been: Something unexpected happens + Her negative interpretation of the event/events = Her reaction is anger and lashing out at her kids AND her husband as soon as he walks in the door.

Here is what Abigail has learned to do:

She spent many weeks memorizing Scripture so that when something happens, she can immediately access an appropriate Scripture to help her think anew. She has renewed her mind through (symbolically) the washing of her mind through the Water of the Word! She often then turns on praise music. Because music affects our emotions either for good or for ill. She chooses Christian music to keep her mind on Christ. And it floods the entire household. She chooses to speak the Scriptures out loud so the children also hear the Word. This is life-changing for them as well.

We work on strategies once a week via phone. AND…we are deliberate in celebrating together every single tiny little victory over the anger. She knows I know how difficult is has been.  She knows she can email whenever she needs a word of encouragement. She knows she can count on me to be her “cheerleader”!

The “SOMETHING” out of whack still continues to happen. LIFE still happens!

The only difference is that she views it through the eyes of Christ/The Word now. So she interprets the whole thing differently. She knows that she is the adult and must act like one. The kids will CATCH how to act from her. So she knows her REACTION is important. She cannot have the luxury of letting her emotions rule. That is why the memorization of Scripture is so important. It changes her whole outlook on her life…

Resulting in her entirely different Life GIVING Reaction.

So, we are back to the 2 formulas we learned a couple weeks ago.

Our natural unredeemed self vs. our renewed mind resulting in an ADULT Christ-like response! Those are the 2 options when our day goes south! Which will you choose? If this has been helpful, please leave a comment.

I’d like to hear from you. I’d like to help you find the path to joy and inner peace that Abigail has found.