Here’s Your Okay Light

It’s just me and my man snuggling on the couch under a flannel quilt. He checks his phone to see that it is now officially 1 degree outside, and he wonders why 68 degrees in the house feels colder in this weather than it does in the summer.

We’re being all peaceful and chatty, then all of a sudden I do this mental walk-through of the day until I’m shivering –from anxiety.

Welcome to the cold and harsh land of second guessing oneself.

If you’ve followed my blog for longer than, oh, say two days, then you know I have self-tortuous tendencies.

What if my teaching idea was bad today?

What if everything I said in class was stupid?

What if I lose my job tomorrow because I’m the worst teacher in the universe. The whole universe.

Matt says if that happens and he loses his job, too, because he’s the worst preacher in the whole universe, then we can move into a little camper together and still love each other. This makes me feel better.

I turn to my man and say, I need a light system. Then I could be like, “Hey, I think I did everything horribly today, and this green light signaling *okay* would come on.” That’s how I would know that these feelings are big, fat liars and that I was actually doing a good job at work today.

But there’s no light.

And I realize we don’t know.

We live, and we try hard. (I did try really hard today.)

We invest in people and put love behind our labor. We start early and stay late.

We ask ourselves how we could work even better tomorrow.

“We work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men.” (Colossians 3:23 NASB)

And we rarely know, at the end of the day, whether what we did was okay or not. We only know that we put our backs into it.

Well, maybe that’s all the Lord expects.