My life feels like a combination of Desperate Housewives, Mary Poppins, and Supermarket Sweep.
By God’s humor I find myself a nanny. A suburban Austin Texas nanny to be exact. I’m working for a nice wealthy family, running errands, grocery shopping, cooking dinner, and helping rear their two beautiful daughters. Let’s just say suburban mom’s in wedge flip flops can be alarming competitive in the HEB organic dairy section/life.
Everyone is cooler in Austin. You are either awesomely weird, ridiculously outdoorsy,a hipster, or a Texas hippie, which are my favorite. Austinites are cool, green, fit, and don’t care what anyone else thinks. The percentage of tattoos and piercings is quite high as well. People always seem to be biking somewhere, talking about music, and drinking coffee at some coffee shop that, Heaven forbid, would be Starbucks.
So yes…I wonder what I’m doing in Austin too.
And it’s hard to merge the memories and realities I lived overseas with this new one. For instance, when I’m purchasing other people’s groceries of gluten free organic overpriced food and the children that ate once a day crosses through my mind. What do I do with that? It’s hard when I hear the moms talking about their new diets or stressing about the school carnival to care to engage myself into that conversation. I’m not condemning, just sharing.
Then there was the time when one girl I nanny for adamantly refused to eat a banana because I opened it from the bottom when she asked for my help. I didn’t open it like always mom did. I didn’t do it how she wanted. In my heart, all I could picture where kid’s in Central America digging through trash for food, and here she cried over the fact that her banana was opened upside-down!
Although I put aside my feelings in that situation and talked to the girl about change and the poor kids I knew, she still ate a different banana peeled right side up. She wanted to mail the discarded one to Africa. Cute-but unhelpful. Tears of injustice welled up inside my soul that day. What do I do with what I know now? The six year old isn’t responsible, but I am. How did I go from holding the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich?
A few days later God brought me conviction though. You see- I’ve been having my own little melt downs about how my life looks right now. Everything seems drenched in uncomfortable change. And perhaps I’ve been complaining to God because I believe he has opened my provision upside-down. He’s providing…but His way is throwing me for a loop.
I asked the Lord in that moment to help me not treat things in my life as an upside-down banana. He is good despite my circumstances. He is faithful despite my outlook. He is at work despite my inward focus. He is still calling me to love whoever is in front of me. He’s probably trying showing me His better way anyways.
“My plans aren’t your plans, nor are your ways my ways,says the Lord. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways, and my plans than your plans. Just as the rain and the snow come down from the sky and don’t return there without watering the earth, making it conceive and yield plants and providing seed to the sower and food to the eater, so is my word that comes from my mouth; it does not return to me empty. Instead, it does what I want, and accomplishes what I intend.” Isaiah 55:8-11 CEB
***And in the case of real bananas…I still stand by my trick that opening it from the bottom is way easier.
