I Wish I Were OCD

I’m having one of those days today, where I wish I were more OCD.  I feel like I’m always late, always over budget, always running behind, never able to complete anything…  My desk is always a mess, my  to do list is usually M.I.A. and there’s no time to catch up or catch my breath. I want to learn to play the piano, but there’s never time to practice. I want to write, but there’s never a quiet place. I was trying to explain to one of my single friends why I can’t get together for coffee until April. From her perspective, all I do is go to the grocery and meet my kids after school at the bus stop.  Really, when I look at things from that perspective, I wonder why I’m all tangled up in knots? But time is so elusive and seems to slip away.  Field trips and homework projects aren’t just assigned to them and when I get behind on any part of our schedule, it’s like train cars crashing into one another.  If I miss doing laundry for a week, six laundry baskets crash into one another and all of us notice. Same with if I neglect going to the grocery or take the night off from cooking dinner. I’m lucky if I can get a workout in, a shower and a grocery run and then before I know it, it’s bedtime! And time to wake up and do it all over again!  I feel like a failure most the time. I wish I were more OCD-  one of those women who loved routines and doing the same thing over and over again.  The type who color codes her sock drawer and got a thrill out of organizing and inventing systems.  Honestly, I think the only way I survive is that I’m not OCD. I mean, I literally just wiped my youngest son’s mouth with a dirty sock that I found on the floor in the mud room because he wanted me to help him tie his shoes to go outside and had just finished the last of his pb&j from lunch and it was hanging on his cheeks like peanut butter whiskers. All the while,  I’m hunched over a laundry basket in my laundry room/office typing and he’s incessantly asking “Can I go outside? Can I go outside? Can I go outside?” until he finally gets my attention by slapping me on the bum.  Now they’re all outside and I’m listening to the whoosh of my washing machine, with papers scattered all around the surface of my desk.  I could take the time to stop writing an organize my desk (which is what I probably should do) or I could finish writing and see where this leads? And here in lies my problem.  But God knows this about me… that my strengths lie in doing original tasks, joy, for me, comes from a blank page, the freedom to choose how to fill it.  But we don’t always get to choose how to fill our days, or our pages. Many tasks in life are chosen for us, requiring what is required of us to complete the task.  Let us work as though working for the Lord, for in fact, we really are.  Let me organize and tidy, clean out and throw away to the best of my ability for the glory of the Lord.  Let me do my best, even in the despised tasks – in fact, even more so. Let me lift them up as an act of Agape love and serve Him first, then my family second.  And my prayer is that perhaps in the newly created white space on my desk I will be able to find more white space in my days.