Looking back in my journals I found this posting from my Spiritual Discipline group that I participated in for 18 months. This post is dated on November 18, 2011, but feels fresh for me today on February 9, 2013. Ever still the journey, my "Undone" life:

 

If God’s work in my life recently were put in a title it would be:  The purpose of an “Undone” life.  I have had to recognize something in my life recently that is an incredible weakness I have, and that is there are certain things I can’t stand to have undone. It is not that I am a perfectionist because I can have many other undone messy tasks around me and it doesn’t bother me, but I will OCD about just a few, the areas that are a priority to me and will obsess over the need to have those areas buttoned down to the very best of my ability.

As a staff we have a web-based service that we use for calendar, facility approval and our planning process. It uses a red, yellow and green light system to show the status of any scheduling you are doing within our church. It bothers me to have any event I am responsible for to have anything but a green light. Sometimes the red or yellow is a non-issue, it may show as a conflict within our system but we know it is a shared resource not a conflict of resource.

For example, I had a kick off brunch scheduled for our women who were working/serving/or interested in being a part of our Savor the Season event on Sept. 10th at 10:30 am and we also had a men’s breakfast the same day but the men’s event was to take place earlier in the morning. These events showed red in our system as a conflict because the clean up time for the men and the preparation time for the women were overlapping. Even though we had a side conversation as teams and negotiated how we would accommodate one another, the system still showed it as a conflict. Everyone was good with it; we were moving on, problem solved…except for the fact that every day when I logged on to the system I saw that I had a red event on my user dashboard. So instead of just allowing that to continue (and here is where my OCD behavior kicks in) I have a secondary login to the system as an administrator and used it to go in and override the conflict that allowed both events to change as green status, good to go, all is at peace within my world.  Our office manager could have done that, but I didn't want to bother her with something that would sound so trivial to others and since part of my job is to hold our team accountable for the implementation and organization of their events this was a double hit on my OCD radar. Honestly, it was a pride thing.

This is where God continues to speak to me about the things undone, not in a bad way….go and get it done and always fix it way…but in a way that says….it is ok for some things to continue in my life with a redlight….allowing some things to ride out it’s intended purpose. I am challenged to move beyond living where I am always asking God what He wants me to do about something and being better at just throwing my hands up in response to Him and asking Him what He is going to do about it, not in an irreverent way but in submission to the one who holds it all.  It is liberating to be honest about who is really in charge and who is really responsible to turn items from red to green in my life. Daily I am reminded and choosing, not to override with my administrator login, or to do a back door manipulative to fix it so I feel better, but to let the conflict of shared space and resources of life travel together.

Sum total of my current undone life, trusting Him with my heart not just my words, and really getting to the place where that trust is as normal as the rhythms of grace we are referring to instead of forced heavy steps of obedience.