Patience

We have been in this house for nearly a month now, and I still feel like we haven't moved in. Of course, this place is just a temporary stopping-place, and we will be moving into our more permanent residence in about 6 months, but I just hate the unfinished business of boxes and endless searching for that random item that I haven't needed in 3 years but just happen to need today. I hate boxes! My life has become solely about endless mounds of corrugated madness and everything therein for the past month or so. At home I'm tripping over them, have no place to put them, really don't want to unpack much more because I'm just going to have to pack them back up again very soon. At work, Daddy Warbucks brings trailers full of them, and they stack up and I'm tripping over them there, and just when we have unpacked the last box, he shows up with more. And then Friday night I was at work until 9:00 pm packing up infinite numbers of books into boxes. I am so very sick of cardboard.

But it's okay, really... cardboard has come to mean transition, change, growth and expansion. It's a mirror of my internal self: unpacking certain items, truths, that have been long since forgotten or hidden away, and boxing up or discarding old pieces that no longer have use or relevance. Compartmentalizing certain areas -- "No, I can't get into that box now. There's no place to put all that stuff. There will be time for that later..." -- putting some things on hold knowing that God can take better care of them than I at this point.

I'm trying to be patient with all the unfinished business around and inside of me. I am exactly one-half neat freak and one-half pack rat, depending on the mood I'm in. I like to carry stuff around, but only for so long, and then it starts to drive me nuts and I toss it. So as I'm tripping over things in my house and getting irritated and wanting to do crazy things with the boxes that just don't fit anywhere right now (can I just throw away the box that has my china in it? There's nowhere to put it for the next 6 months! Oh, wait, I like my china.), I'm trying to have patience and not let the neat freak freak out too much, trying to remember that it's just a season, we're in transition, and soon we will have a large place in which to spread out and unpack all that stuff. Maybe not today, and maybe it's okay for stuff to look messy and unkempt... there's a process behind the mess. My neat freak self will just have to let go and live in the process instead of trying to control it.

But come April, I never want to see another box again.