In an email from a friend this week, she listed off all the things she was getting done, from house-cleaning to Christmas shopping, and ended with "sometimes I just hate being a grown-up." I could hear her sign and feel her slump. Like the pen thrown down the page in surrender to the list of the demands of life.
I found myself casting loud echo with her statement. Yet I would need to add my grumpy tone and sour scowl. Fully knowing and aware that: my attitude stinks. Somehow recently I've elevated myself above anything that could be considered a task, then given myself a Cinderella complex with pity party as I boar over the job.
I've lived on my own for twelve years, eight of those post college, but somehow my attitude, heart, and mind have twisted in the past year. I've found myself prickling about grocery shopping, humphing about loads of laundry, sighing about vacuuming, snarling about meal-planning, and brewing about having to go to work.
The thing is, everyone does these things. All the Mercedes owners pump gas. All my neighbors lug in their bags of groceries. All my friends do piles of laundry. All homeowners roll out the garbage.
I'd like to crawl back into my parents house and have my mom do all the "grown-up things" for me again. But I can't. I'm the grown-up. I'm the one living the life. I'm the one who also gets to do grown-up things like go out for dinner, sip wine with friends, take airplanes to far places, and attend the theater with my love.
I am a terrible grown-up. I'm a grown-up praying for an attitude change. I'm not there. At all. But I know God well enough to know he will put people in my life to train me as such, offer Truth in my dark spaces, and prune me so that I will have the grown-up attitude of a servant, to do my grown-up things in the Light of Christ.
"You were taught with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." Ephesians 4:22-24
"Therefore, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interest but each of you to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus... taking on the very nature of a servant..." Ephesians 2:1-7
