for the last several months, i have been wanting to write a post on being a square peg in a round hole. i have been counting down the days still school was done for the year and i could confess what a long academic road it has been. it was my first year teaching four kids at once. first year with a new and much more demanding curriculum. it was overwhelming and there were honesty days when i didn’t think we were going to make it.
i wanted to confess to feeling out of my depth, over my head. i wanted to say that i felt like God brought me to this place where i needed to do something that i just couldn’t do. i kept thinking if i prayed harder or worked harder, He would wave His magic wand and suddenly i would be transformed into the serine, unflappable mom who always keeps her cool or the fun mom who says “the heck with the laundry! let’s play monopoly.” instead, i was the overwhelmed mom hiding in her room watching “antique roadshow” cause she just couldn’t take it anymore.
when i went to write this post about how God obviously mis-assigned me, i couldn’t quite do it. it sounded whiny and ungrateful. ungrateful for all the amazing times we had this year. ungrateful for the experiences i got to share with my kids this year. we laughed, we cried, we conquered pre-alegebra.
when i was preparing to have our first baby, jim used to tell me that trying to get away from the pain only made things worse. if you focused on, looked it right in the eye and called its bluff, it wasn’t as bad. it still hurt but you didn’t get lost in it; you didn’t let it win. i think that’s what i did this year. i kept trying to wiggle out from under the discomfort i was in, trying to reorganize my way out of it rather than accepting it as a natural part of the process.
i often hear people talk about how moms need to make time for themselves because if they are happy and fulfilled then it will trickle down to their kids. i am not so sure that happiness should really be our end goal. what if i am called to be happy in the pain rather than looking for ways to kill the pain altogether? what if God doesn’t give us the luxury of happiness but calls us to something higher? maybe all this time i was making the pain worse by not accepting it as what it really is, God’s hand molding me to His own purpose, the smoothing out of my sharp corners. after all, who is the pot to tell the Potter what shape best fits His purpose?
don’t take this as “therefore, we should be at home full-time, making ourselves (and our children) as miserable as we possibly can. i think God calls moms to all sorts of uncomfortable places, in and out of the home. in an imperfect world there are no perfect choices. only faith in a perfect Creator who we can trust to work on those rough spots out in our ultimate favor.
Ah, Crab Apples! 
Boy…that’s lovely. And challenging.
Thanks, Amy.
thanks andrew!
wanted to share this comment from my facebook friend cindy holloway. love the truth she always brings into my life…plus she says nice things about me: “If YOU were perfect, Amy, your kids would look to YOU, not the Savior, as the benchmark. Failure forces us to point our kids upward. It gives us opportunity to seek their forgiveness, thus teaching them to do the same. But do we like it? Nope, not at all. But isn’t that the story of grace we most want them to learn? So keep on keeping on… it’s both about the destination AND the journey getting there… the good, the bad, they everyday ugly…the authentic places where grace shines brightest! Take heart! And by the way… loved your book. I underlined and turned down page corners all the way through”
I think this is a very appropriate way to look at difficult seasons in our lives and the analogy works well for those of us familiar with labor pains. I often marvel at the strength I seemed to possess during that time when I now whine and complain over much smaller ailments. Part of the difference, I believe, was having trained myself in advance to be ready for the labor pain, to accept is as an inevitable part of bringing forth something amazing. I would tinker with Jim’s wording a bit. I was taught not to concentrate on the pain, but to concentrate on finding peace in the middle of it, much like you just described letting the Potter mold us, accepting the shape and being conformed to it.
While I have not mastered that lesson, I have felt very much like a square peg in a round hole for much of the last several years and have been surprised by the prospect of actually being able to step into a near future that looks to fit like a glove. Having given myself so much self-talk about sacrifice and perseverance and faithfulness to the task at hand over the years, it feels a bit foreign to think of stepping into God’s will feeling so full of freedom. (I don’t think it’s because of illusions about the grass being greener over there. I hope I’m not wrong about that.)
I think the tricky thing is figuring out when we’re in situations that are hard with a purpose and when we’re not. Once labor pains draw near, we know they are necessary and that makes them easy to accept as part of our lives. Though we know pain in life is inevitable, it can be difficult to know if some particular pain is inevitable and to know whether to embrace it or to go get in where we fit in. When should we try and fit our situation and when should we find a situation that fits the way we’re made? Well, that is where faith and prayer has to come in. I almost always walk that line with fear and trembling, between the fear of taking the easy way out on the side emphasizing freedom and the fear of neglecting the gifts God has given me in favor of martyrdom on the side of being conformed. (I guess one could even be based on the idea that we are made in His image and the other on the idea that we are to be conformed to His image — both of which are true.) But I think that when we find ourselves in the situation of inevitable pain, choosing to be conformed as you have described here is the most fruitful way to think about it. Thank you.