I haven’t been around this part of my world much over the last few months. I’ve written less in the last four months than in the past nine years. Back in November, the business my husband and I have owned for the past twelve years underwent an unexpected, major employee turnover. Almost overnight, I was thrust into the full-time position as Office Manager in order to keep things running. What we discovered was a massive mess of work that had been improperly done or not done at all, which my assistant and I are still trying to correct and clean up. As a result, I’ve spent hours upon hours staring at numbers and resolving issues. If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, you know I’m much better with words than numbers, and organization is not my strong point. So it’s been a grueling and challenging four and a half months. I kept hoping to make time to write or to sing or to create something —anything— but exhaustion doesn’t make for quality creative work.
During the last four months, I’ve discovered that material things (i.e., stuff) matters very little to me. If it were up to me, I’d sell the house and the cars and live in a peaceful, little spot where I could create every day. That’s the luxury I crave.
I can’t imagine the Creator meant for folks to spend most of their waking hours working soul-crushing jobs. I think many of us do that to ourselves because of culture in which we live. We work hard at doing things we don’t really care about so we can have stuff we don’t really care about so we can try to impress people who don’t really care. In the meantime, our souls and true desires are crushed, which leads us down the path of anxiety and depression and frustration and resentment.
