we’re a hot mess.

In case you had any doubts, let me set the record straight that we are a mess in our family.  Every one of us.

We are never more aware of this than during Moving Week.  Last week we lived in the euphoria of signing a two-year lease on our “top choice” apartment.  Of taking photos and dreaming about paint colors and pictures on the walls and finally having a guest room.

Then this week, reality hit.  And it hit hard.

Moving is just plain stressful.  And we should know.  David and I have now officially lived in eight homes in our seven years of marriage.

But moving in a third world country is insane.  You’d think it wouldn’t be, because in this culture someone can be hired to do any task you can imagine, and at an affordable price even.  Here you don’t paint your house; you hire a painter.  You don’t pack your belongings and hire a U-Haul and then unpack them; you hire a moving company.

All of this sounded like a dream come true for us; until we remembered that absolutely nothing about our life here has been simple thus far.  Remember David’s Office Depot trip?  Well imagine a scenario like that for every single aspect of moving.  Hours and hours of waiting.  Workers don’t show up on time.  Work isn’t done right, or it takes way longer, or costs more than you originally thought.  And of course there’s the language barrier.

David summed up our move (and sometimes our life) well when he said, “Every single thing feels like a battle here.” Some of this is probably just because we’re foreigners, we get that.  But it’s still exhausting.  And it kind of drains the joy out of a new home.

So apply all this stress to our family of four, and you get a week full of lots of bad moods and complaining and snapping and melt-downs.

I went over to Maggie’s the other day, at my wits’ end, and I vented.  Then, I said, “Just tell me how to figure this out so David and I won’t have so many arguments.”

And my wise friend thought for a moment and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t focus on figuring out a plan to make everything go better.  Maybe instead you should ask God to help you to repent more.”

Repent more?

Wait, that doesn’t solve my problem.  That implies that I’m still messing up.  And the point is for me not to mess up.  The point is to get it right the first time.  No, no, no.  I hate repenting.  It’s so humiliating.

But I went back home and chewed on her words for awhile and later told them to David.

So we asked God to help us repent more, and then we confessed to thinking the worst of one another and getting defensive and not communicating very well.  Last night we repented to our kids for our grouchy moods.  So far so good.  But then we had to repent to them again today for more grouchy moods.  Ugh.  I was hoping once would do the trick.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what is so difficult about confessing that I’m wrong and asking forgiveness of a four and two-year-old, but somehow everything in me bucks against it.  I think of every possible excuse.  They probably didn’t even notice.  I won’t do it again.  I’ll make up for snapping at them by being extra nice the rest of the day.  They won’t even really understand what I’m taking about.

But today at lunch when I was so irritable and stressed I wanted to scream, God reminded me that I really just needed to be honest and repent.  So I said, “Judah and Amie, can you pray for Mommy because I do not have a happy heart right now.  I have a grouchy heart.”  Phew.  I sat and waited for them to melt into smiles and hug me and bow in prayer.

But Judah said, “Yeah I know.  And when you screamed at me today that hurt my feelings.”

Oh.

I guess they do understand.  So I told them I was wrong, I asked them to forgive me, and they both said, “Yes Mommy!  I forgive you!”  And then they each prayed for Mommy’s heart.  And you know what, some of the stress eased away at lunch.  My heart felt lighter.

So yes, repenting is super uncomfortable.  Somehow it just keeps bringing up more situations that warrant repentance.  And Maggie’s right, it doesn’t exactly “fix” David and I getting into arguments or me yelling at my kids, at least not in the way I want it to.

In other words, we’re still a mess.

But these last two days there’s been a tiny difference.  A softening, maybe.  A bearing with one another.  An openness.  The repentance, it’s contagious.  And it’s hard to harbor hurts and to try to prove I’m right and to wallow in what a bad mother I am with the hope of repentance staring me in the face.

So, it turns out that this crazy, stressful Moving Week is the best thing that could happen to us.  Because this week our sin and our mess has been front and center, and God has been with us in it.  He’s saying, It’s not South Asia or your painter or the internet company that’s the problem here; it’s your hearts.  And they are what I’m making new.  There’s so much hope for you all.

Praise God, from whom all these blessings flow.