I have skirt angels in my life. I prefer wearing skirts (a fairly recent phenomenon, but that is another story for another time), but I rarely get a chance to shop. I find it quite an effort to either bring the kids or to leave them to be watched. Either way, someone is under the pile with a lot of children, so I tend to do my shopping in "bulk". This is true for food as well as for clothes. If I have to buy Spring clothes for my kids, then I try to buy everything at once, if possible. This way it is done, for the most part (sometimes I still run out for the odd thing). I have been thinking about doing shopping for myself, but have put it off as I didn't want to spend and I didn't want to take the time.
Well, someone recently saved me a boatload of time and money and blessed me! I don't know exactly how it came about, but as this friend went through her own closet, she set aside quite a large number of things, particularly skirts, for me that she was either not wearing or not fitting and as of a day or two ago, they are all in my closet now! Thank you dear sister in Christ! I know some women out there would find this perhaps too humbling an experience and to be honest, it is humbling, but I have to get over myself and I see it as a gift from God. When I looked at the things she gave me, they were all items I would have chosen if I'd been shopping and they were all my size. Believe it or not this is not the first time this has happened to me.
A couple years ago, someone in the library I had never met had noticed me and noticed that I wore skirts a lot. She also wore skirts a lot, but over the period of a few babies, she had gained an extra pound or two and couldn't fit into some. This woman got the library to call me and then I called her. This was how I received another unimaginably large amount of beautiful clothes. Both of these women could have just dropped them off at Goodwill, but all the clothes were in such good shape in both cases that I think they would have preferred that they go "to a good home"! Well, allow me to be the recipient! To even think about taking the time to shop right now makes me feel a heavy burden, so this lifts that from me for awhile.
This week was also the week I went and enjoyed a night out with my sister listening to Leigh Ann Tuoy in Toronto. This was the gift of tickets I was given by my sister many weeks ago and it finally happened this past Monday. We went our for dinner, too, which was just awesome - also a gift from her mother-in-law to us! So I see God's blessings flowing abundantly in my life. The woman we heard speak was so funny. She was the mom from the move Blind Side, played by Sandra Bullock (who won an Oscar for her role). She is a Christian woman and she shared the whole story from start to present day how she met this black boy, Michael Orr, and how he went from virtually homeless to an NFL star just because she and her family turned their car around - a random act of kindness that forever changed his life and their's. That was her whole point that night. "Turn around," she kept saying. Go back. Look for a person where you can do a random act of kindness. It could change someone's life. Get out of your social circle. Get out of your comfort zone. Take risks.
My two "skirt angels" did that for me. I was the recipient of random acts of kindness. My sister, her mother-in-law, also did that for me. I'm feeling I need to give back! I keep asking the Lord, show me, who, Lord, how, when? It makes me want to go out and adopt the next homeless child I see, but in this little town there aren't too many on our downtown streets, but I know they must be out there!
For now, I keep doing random acts of kindness here in the home. They aren't always received with a lot of thanksgiving. Yesterday I thought I smelled something coming from my toddler's bottom area and I asked him if he needed to be changed. "Yeah." So I threw him up in the air, kind of playing with him, tossing him around, flipping him over, all the way from the couch to the kitchen. That was when I felt a dampness. "Had he been sitting in water?" He spills his cups on purpose all the time now, so it wouldn't have surprised me. Then I saw his finger, covered in uh, what looked like peanut butter, but it wasn't peanut butter.
By this point I was at the couch. I hadn't taken his pants off, but there was, let's call it "waste", ALL OVER THE COUCH. But I hadn't taken his pants off! How could this be? Then I looked at myself. It was EVERYWHERE....from my sweater all the way down to the bottom of my skirt. I quickly took off his diaper and there was hardly anything in it. In all my playing, tossing and flipping, I had unknowingly dumped the ENTIRE diaper, which was a "loose movement", all the way from the kitchen, down the hall, all over my clothes, to the couch. DISGUSTING!!!!!! How I didn't notice this while it was happening is a mystery. So I had a lot of cleaning up to do. No one thanked me. No one even knew. I did call my daughter to take a picture though. One day I'll look back and see how humourous it was and wish for those poo days again!
I don't think I'm being called to anything more than what I am currently doing, but I'm open to what God shows me in the future. In the meantime I change diapers a lot more carefully now!
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