Belief is a tricky thing. It's one thing to think, I'm going to lose 50 pounds someday, another thing to write it on a list, and a whole other ball of wax to BELIEVE that you will lose 50 lbs.
As it was with my goal to visit Marcie.
I'm pretty sure I didn't really believe I was going to visit... To save the money, find a flight, book the ticket and actually make the trip from Timberlea, Nova Scotia to Tempe, Arizona. It sounded so big to the little redhead from Lockeport. I think if I had written, "visit Venus", my belief level might have been about the same.
And I don't know about you, but everything in my life that I've learned, every STINKIN thing, has been a process. There have been no aha moments for me. Each good and true perspective or behaviour or belief has been slowly earned and learned over a course of time and trials and failures and overcome excuses.
So three years ago, I'd grown to be the woman who not only wrote it on the list, but then ALSO looked up how much a flight to Phoenix would cost. Two years ago I took another step in my belief and registered with a site that sent me an email every morning to tell me what the current best deal on a flight to Phoenix was. And this year, I told Marcie I was coming, booked a flight, and here I sit in Tempe Arizona in front of Jon's AWESOME mac telling y'all about my journey. I spent the morning at the gym with my best friend, and now Marcie's writing her weekly Deep Thoughts from the Gym, listening to tunes, and I'm inspired just enough to write my "deep" thoughts too. And they're not thoughts about SOMEDAY. They're about TODAY.
Today, I woke up in this magnificent sea of a bed between my two beautiful daughters, in ARIZONA! I snuck away for a shower and some of that daily devotional time I still haven't figured out how to consistently share with my family, crept down the gorgeous marble stairs, missed one of those lovely stairs, and made a great big ruckus of an ankle turning, then hobbled to the couch, made some more noise as I raised the blinds so I could see the blue sky, palm trees and orange and grapefruit trees dripping and dropping with fruit. There was nobody around but me and the birdies, and boy did we have a good time. They sang up a storm and I prayed and read and smiled and giggled a bit to myself about my inability to master stairs after 44 years of practice.
But that's just it, isn't it? We live this life, we learn stuff, we do some of the same stuff over and over, and we try out new stuff. And sometimes we miss a step and fall down and make some noise. And then we hobble over to a place we can think and rest in the moment, in the TODAY, and then we get up and take another step forward.
Today is good. And the day I left Nova Scotia was good too. I snuggled with my sweetie an extra hour after his night shift, got up and had breakfast with one awesome son, packed him off to school, then had breakfast with another amazing son, drove him to school to get a little extra time with him, searched for dried lavender to make Swiss Lavender Fudge (?!!?) for Ted's school project, met a new friend, got home and made the fudge (tastes like chocolate, but smells like something you should hang in mesh to freshen your closet), did some laundry and some dishes, finished packing and then enjoyed our long dreamt of journey to Arizona. Dreaming, planning, ...soooo good, soooo important. But what I've learned is that BELIEVING and DOING are life-giving, self-esteem building, vital parts of living every today. Today really is a gift, isn't it? Somebody was clever enough to figure out that one of the phrases we can use to describe today is "the present". I don't think that's a mistake. I think that's awesome.
Jesus put it this way: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." ~Matthew 6:34
