Falling Water

Sometimes God uses strange messengers!

I grabbed the wet neck of the glass water bottle with my left hand, and the cap with my right, but before I could cap it, I felt the bottle slide through my fingers.  It hit the floor flat on its bottom, bounced once, and then fell over on its side, the water gulping out onto the floor. I picked up the bottle, put it on the kitchen counter, walked a couple of steps, plucked the kitchen towel off the handle of the refrigerator and dropped it on top of the puddle, using my post-op surgical boot to gently move the towel around on the floor to sop up the water. I picked up the towel and carried it out to the back porch, where I hung it over the handle of the vacuum to let it dry before I tossed in into the laundry basket.  Incident over.

So why am I telling you this?  Because after it happened, as I thought about it, I recognized what a powerful indicator this simple accident was of how much I have changed over the past years, how much I have healed.  Had this same thing happened five years ago, and maybe even two years ago, it would have had a much different effect on me, and probably on most of my morning.  I would have been caught up in negative self-talk: Boy are you stupid. What did you do that for? Pay attention to what you're doing. Can't you do anything right? I don't have time for this, and on and on and on.  I would have been angry at myself and that anger would have carried over into the rest of my day. That internal conversation would have gone on for far longer than it took to clean up the spill and move onto something else.  But that's how I used to be.

Funny how the littlest thing can give us the biggest insight!  True, I have to be aware and present, open to that insight coming in, but when I am, Wow! It's incredible to me how God is always working to show me how far I've come, how much progress I have made, how I'm not the person I used to be.  She wants me to recognize that I am different, that the work I have done over all these years to help myself heal, has made a difference.  She keeps proving to me that when I stay the course, do what needs to be done, change happens. Good change. Visible change. Important change.

In the grand scheme of things, the fact that I cleaned up that spill and moved on to other things without it effecting my ability to do so is barely consequential, barely worth mentioning.  But when I think of  the meaning of how I did what I did, well, that's not so inconsequential at all.