Solving myself

When you get married, it helps to marry a person who possesses many of the qualities you do not. When you look at it in the grand scheme of things, it makes a lot of sense. It is a really beautiful design - there is a person in your life that is truly your ‘other half’ and you balance each other out, allowing for each others’ weaknesses because usually they are your strengths.

It also drives you crazy, because, conversely, there also are the things at which they will always be naturally far better than you. These are often things that will be publicly exposed so everyone who knows the two of you is aware of what’s going on. Just God, doing His thing to keep you humble.

An example of this occurred while getting ready for this weekend. When getting ready for a camping trip, I’ll usually need to make a comprehensive list of everything that I need, and even then there’s a good chance that I’ll forget something inconsequential like the tent, or forks. I hate lists, or at least the process of making one. However, this time I didn’t even take the time to make a list. Thankfully, we got everything we needed for the weekend... or so I thought.

One of my favorite parts of camping is getting to cook outdoors. I’m not at the point yet where I can effortlessly whip up a soufflé using a rustic cast-iron skillet over a campfire, but I can do pretty well using my Coleman 2-burner camp stove. Breakfasts are my specialty - eggs, bacon, chocolate chip pancakes, et cetera (hey, if I’m not backpacking, we do it up right!). So we had the stove packed up with all the necessary utensils, and worked the All-Star Breakfast into the daily meal plan. My father-in-law woke me up this morning asking if we could get that stove set up - the guys were ready for getting their eat on. I start to pull things out of the trunk of the car, and that’s when I realized that we were sunk. You see, my camp stove usually has this little piece of metal attached to the back that connects the propane canister to the burners. This oh-so-useful part was currently lying in a box of other camping equipment down in the basement, where I didn’t even think of looking when packing up. Thankfully, we punted by building a slow fire that actually turned out pretty dang good pancakes after about 3 hours.

I am not a born list-maker.

Sarah, however, could do it in her sleep - she enjoys making lists because the crossing-off is so satisfying to her. What’s more, it’s easy for her because she’s just wired that way, methodically, systematically going through the different categories in her mind and organizing as she goes along. Methodical and systematic are two of the last words people would ever use to describe me. There are times when I’m really glad when my brain works the way it does, but there are also plenty of times when I feel so handicapped. You see, I organize externally the way I do internally, which is to say there are about 500 things going on all at once, and I have no idea how to sort them out. Ah, life as an ADD sufferer.

Without a doubt, my lack of ability to organize was my downfall in school. In third grade, I had an assignment to do on Minnesota, using various landmarks to show what I’d learned about our great state. We’d had a couple weeks to work on it at home; it was due the next morning, and, of course, I had nothing to show. In tears, I begged my dad to do it for me, and like all good dads, he refused. I stayed up as late as I possibly could, and finally got it done sometime before midnight. Not my best work, to say the least. Something like that makes an impact on my 9-year-old self, and I vow never to let that happen again.

Fast forward to junior year of high school: it’s my Honors English class, the beginning of 2nd quarter. My teacher, Mz. Carlson (“it wasn’t our business whether she was Miss or Mrs.”) hands out the sheet detailing our anthology project, a huge book that was to be handed in the week before Christmas break. This was about late October.

It’s December 17th. At 5:30 a.m. Guess where I am. If you said the local Kinko’s with my friend Dave, getting the binding put on our book, our other friends having gone home to sleep hours ago, you’re right on. Again, I swear vehemently that this will be the last time I let something like this happen.

You get the picture.

Like I said, I do think that it’s pretty sweet that Sarah and I balance each other out the way we do. When she’s really stressed about things, going over those lists in her head and concluding that there’s no possible way she can get everything done on time, I’m the voice of reason, calming her down and taking her mind off all the minutiae. Sometimes, though, it feels like God looked down at me like I was Adam, saying “It is not good for man to be alone, because I’m pretty sure this guy lacks the essential ability to manage on his own.”

No man is an island, but sometimes couldn’t I at least be a peninsula covered mostly by water?

How does this continue to occur? Am I missing something, or is it truly just the way I’m doomed to function in life, ‘letting it happen to me’, if you will?

Instead of paying attention to my strengths, I continue to want what I don’t have, wanting others’ abilities to do this or that instead of being thankful for my own gifts that have been given to me for a reason. Maybe that idea of ‘letting things happen’ to me is key to figuring this out. When I’m aware that there are these weaknesses, I should be factoring those into how I respond to situations. Letting something happen denotes passivity, not activity.

I don’t know how this one resolves, actually, because I’m still in it figuring this out. What would life look like if I were actually better at doing this? Come to think of it, how does my view of self compare to the way God sees me?