Well, today did not go well. If I had to summarize the past few waking hours of my life, that would be it. Oh, don't get me wrong, some really good things happened today. Then the ONE REALLY BAD THING happened, and I completely lost my sanity.
So, I lost an important paper. This paper, in perspective, keeps one of my major college loans from going into repayment...next week. Life and all its expenses are enough without added expenses that didn't need to be there. This whole episode reminded me of how disorganized I am, which means that I am irresponsible, which makes me incompetent for life and a horrible person that frustrates everyone around me. And yes, I got ALL THAT from a lost piece of paper.
And what's even worse? I totally lost my cool. I got really upset. I don't even know why I was so upset. Usually, I am a pro at handling stressful situations. That's my job. However today, I not only lost a piece of paper, but I temporarily lost the ability to deal with my life.
My boss saw me losing it and stopped me in the hallway. I made some comment to him about locking myself in my office for the betterment of humanity and he told me, "Don't do that." I explained to him that I was frustrating everyone around me and I needed to not be with people and he told me something that I had never heard before in my life: "Don't play the movie before it's been made." He said that many times, especially in frustrating times, we rush to conclusions about what other people are thinking, and the entire scenerio is playing in our minds before it even happens. Most of the time we are entirely off base. "Chelsea, don't play the movie before it's been made. Don't try to guess what I am thinking about you."
We stood and talked for a while in the hallway and he started telling me about the people in our lives that can be false prophets to us. Sometimes these people are close to us. Sometimes they are our friends. We often can become false prophets to ourselves. Like the people of Israel listened to the false prophets in the Old Testament, we can hear and believe something about ourselves that is completely devoid of God's truth. In Him we are precious and loved and valued and empowered. Why do we so often choose to believe the false prophets that say we are failures?
Well, it was 5:00, so I rushed home and TORE APART my room. I mean, every single paper that I should have thrown away months ago was scattered all over my bedroom floor. I was digging through boxes in my closets and old college backpacks and then I found it: a bagel from at least a year and a half ago, sitting on a pair of socks that had not been washed in just as long. Gross does not begin to describe the sight. Any bugs that had attempted to feast on the historical morsel had died and disintegrated long ago. And the bagel was COMPLETELY petrified. For a moment, I forgot every every problem that I had ever gone through as I tried to wrap my mind around what I was looking at. And then I started laughing.
Well, I never found the paper. I ended up having to order another one. The whole thing really wasn't worth a stroke, though I nearly gave myself one. It took a petrified bagel from an old backpack in my closet to remind me that everything is ok, and God can really use anything to get our attention and bring us peace. As Francesca Battistelli says, sometimes the stuff that drives us crazy is the stuff God uses to show us that "it's not the end of the world."
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