Dear Gentle Reader,

My blog did so well the other day it crashed for about 36 hours. It’s like good and bad all rolled into one. I stayed cool, though, (until 10 pm–sorry Audra).  I kept telling myself this is an opportunity for change. I’ve been wanting to make changes to my website and this is presenting me with a gentle tickle (at 11 pm it was a brick wall).  I’ve been talking about changes and then, not changing. Talking the talk, not doing the walk. Then the excuse part came in. I don’t know HOW to make the changes, I don’t have TIME to make the changes, I don’t want to ask for help to make the changes.

I love self-sabotage.  Not the actual act of it but that I now I have a name for it.  It’s so good.  It’s freeing.  You know how you set yourself up for failure and then when you “fail” you totally beat yourself up.  For example, yes, you will totally run that 10k race even though it is the morning after New Year’s EVE and you are the one throwing the party for 500 people at your house and you  just had open toe surgery on your foot 3 weeks ago and the race is in Alaska.  And then you pretty much get carried away in a stretcher at the 1k mark while you curse yourself for being unathletic, out of shape, a total loser…etc…  Or, my favorite, you take your two small boys to Target, the dry cleaners, Costco, the Post Office, and a store made entirely out of crystalglassextrabreakableexpensive things that look like toys but aren’t, and they haven’t had lunch or a nap and it’s like, Black Friday and Christmas Eve at the same time and everyone and everything—goes—very—wrong, and then you say, I’m just not patient enough, or not a good enough mom, etc…  I mean maybe you are thinking I would never do something that extreme but really?  Isn’t it the same as being completely unrealistic about our limitations and then when it doesn’t work out we blame ourselves?  Now I have a name for it–self-sabotage.  And by having a name for it makes me feel like I’m not the only person who messes up and I can stop myself and say there is a difference between aiming high and just being DUMB.

Another way we, meaning me, self-sabotage ourselves (myself) is to not ask for help.  Help is so weak.  Help is so passé.  Ha.

So last night at 10:30, after the brick wall, I turned on my iPad and opened my iBooks.  I’m in the middle of reading Carry On, Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton and in iBooks when you open the app it opens directly to the page you left off.  So imagine my surprise when  it opened to an entirely different book that happens to be a devotional that I am not reading, haven’t opened, and was just staring at a few minutes ago THINKING I should open it.  I swear this is all true.  And imagine my surprise when I start reading the page it opened to and it says, ASK FOR HELP.  “All you need to do is ask for help…when the path before you looks easy and straightforward, you may be tempted to go it alone instead of relying on God.  This is when you are in the greatest danger of stumbling.”  It did NOT feel like a coincidence.  So I went to bed and I asked for help.  When I got up my site was back up.

I know it is not always easy like this.  In fact, I said to myself, “SELF it is not always easy like this”.

Ten minutes later I opened my iPad and it automatically went to iBooks.  Remember it opens to the exact place you left off–which in this case was the devotional from random October 3rd–and it opens to March 10th, NOT WHERE I LEFT OFF, and it says “This sounds easy but it requires a deep level of trust, based on the knowledge that God’s way is perfect.”

Well.

The devotional is Jesus Calling by Sarah Young.  I’m just going to carry around the pocket version around with me now in lieu of the whole self-sabotage issue.

Love, Jen