Chaos

My life is chaos.  Complete chaos.  It is a great life.  I have an amazing husband, beautiful children, friends who would do anything for me, a great family, a huge extended family who drives me crazy, and yet who I couldn't imagine getting through life without, and yet my life is in an extreme state of disorder.  I look around my house and wonder what I have done wrong to live in such a state of mess.  My husband and I often talk of selling our house and moving to a smaller house in an effort to have a smaller mortgage.  I am beginning to believe that God is telling us that is not the answer simply because putting our house on the market would put me in a pure state of panic.  I think my anxiety would go through the roof.  My family is just not meant to be the family who lives in a state of model home living.  We really live.  Things get messy.  Our house looks lived in.  I want to walk in to my home and have it look completely neat and orderly.  I want everything to have a place and everything to be in that place. I want it to look like Alice lives here.  However, I am slowly beginning to realize that what I want and what is realistic are 2 very different things.  When I started praying for complete surrender a few years back, I really had no idea of the depths of what I was asking for.  I also am just beginning to realize how far I have to go in the prayer, and it is a bit daunting.  Prayer is painful.  I know it is entirely worth it, and I am excited for the changes that have happened, are happening, and are yet to come, but it is not easy.  I am not always skipping and jumping along gleefully with this plan that Jesus has for me.  More often than not, I am dragging my feet as He pulls me along, doing only what I have begged Him to do in the first place.  As the parent of a teen, I am beginning to see the difficult job he has of dealing with children who think they know it all but really know oh so little of the world.  I wonder how many times a day He shakes His head at me and "Oh my precious child, You have no idea what you are doing.  Please just listen to me.  I do know what I am doing.  I can help you with this.  Do what I say, and life will be so much easier.  Do what is say, and the chaos will cease.  Just listen, my child.  Just listen."