Awesomeness

I haven't posted in a while.  My routine from last year has shifted.  I teach the 1st-3rd choir at church now and I have to take my twins to kinder as well as pick them up each day.  Somehow the 2 of those things have made me out of the routine of blogging as often.

I read the book Start--Punch Fear in the Face the other day.  My husband and I are big Dave Ramsey fans and the author, Jon Acuff, is a speaker at Dave events so I guess Aaron heard of him that way.  Anyway, he read the book and encouraged me to read it.  I'm glad I did.  It's a motivational book basically about the road to awesomeness.   

It's funny--I think of awesome as this wow kind of thing that people who are CEOs get to do in ivory towers somewhere.  This book helped me see that every day, just being who God made me to be, I can be awesome. 

I can be an awesome wife.  Just yesterday at the grocery store I did a very rare impulse buy of hot sauce for Aaron because I knew he didn't care much for the previous one I got for him.  That was awesomeness. 

I can be an awesome mom.  The past weekend Aaron hung his banjo (he's teaching himself to play) and my guitar up on the wall, well within the boys' reach.  The boys love strumming both instruments while they sing.  Precious!  The musician and adult in me who is averse to non-musical instrumentation cringes that they play, but the awesome mom in me applauds that they love music and worships as they sing "Jesus Loves Me' with such gusto. 

I got to practice awesomeness in friendship the other day when I took a mom who's new to the area to MOPs.  I even got to figure out how to attach her 2 car seats in my car--not my skill set.

But here's the thing--these awesome things come rather easily to me.

What's harder is what I did this morning--I said no.  Let me preface to say that no is just not a word I say easily.  I want the whole world to love me and I figured out at an early age that "yes" wins many friends.  "No" can be lonely.

As the choir teacher, I took on a huge project:  I'm directing a children's musical at our church combining 3 choirs (ages 4-6th grade), drama, etc to do basically a living nativity program.  Should be very, very sweet.  There are just lots of moving parts I have to coordinate.  I've delegated well and now I get to work on managing the parts to be sure everything comes out as it should.

Tonight is choir night and I have to be at my best to teach the kids what we need to learn for the very quickly approaching program.  This morning was Community Bible Study.  I play the piano for the worship section and it is not a snap for me to play.  I have to practice the song and be prayerful that the Lord will bless my effort for his glory.  If I'm not in the right mindset, I get nervous, flustered and I miss God's blessing.  Today was good.  However, after I played the children's director gently reminded me I had signed up for being a Love Lady today.  (Extra helper for the children's program). 

I know my face fell.  She knows that 3 years ago I loved helping out.  Now, not so much.  She graciously asked if she should ask someone else to do it today and I said with my hesitation..."yes."  I couldn't believe I actually said that!  I apologized but she was very quick to say that there are ladies who love doing it and she would much prefer honesty to me doing it with a reluctant heart.  What a blessing!

Yesterday I got an email that pertained to the kids' musical.  I won't go into it, but suffice it to say it was a request for me to do even more than what I committed to with this project.  I'm the world's worst at a knee-jerk "yes" and then I feel bad about it later.  This time, I knew no was best, but I talked it over with Aaron and had his full support of the no.  Saying no still wasn't easy, but doing so is the road to awesomeness.

We all have moments of awesomeness.  I'm just glad that I'm finally learning that being awesome isn't making everyone else happy.  It's being true to who God made me to be and being my very best version of that every day.