This One's For The Working Mama Katie Alexander

If you’ve been sticking it out episode after episode and if you’ve been actually reading the chapters in Proverbs, you may start to feel like they all blend together. Like there is a lot of talk about rulers, servants, wisdom, sinners and the poor. Too many words strung together can lose their meaning and repetition can either lead to a true penetration to the heart or a complete dismissal.
I’m on Proverbs 29 in my own reading. I read it, then read it again and start to hear a lot of the same buzz words. My initial reaction is “more of this” but then I thought maybe those words are for me.

Why am I so different? Why am I not just content to be home day after day with my kids and home with no other projects? Am I less of a mother because I desire to do something with the talents and gifts God has given me? Have I created an idol out of my work or tied my identity to my job description?

What you put out, you get back. I’ve read through proverbs 27 multiple times and that’s the message that hits me where I am today. Cultivating relationships with people in your normal, busy, day-to-day lives creates a community of people who are there for you when struggle comes. Being the kind of loving wife who is gracious and compassionate, returns a gracious and compassionate husband when you find yourself in turmoil. The effort you put into your work even if it feels unnoticed and under praised, is rewarded when millions in the world are without a job and you find yourself still in yours.

Like most of you, I’m sitting in my home. It’s day 19 of a country wide “safer at home” order encouraging social distancing, staying home except for necessities, home school, toilet paper rationing and a flood and I mean tsunami type flood of media with varying degrees of gloom, doom and peppered in hope. Those charts cataloging positive cases and deaths are complete eye sores, those maps that showed red circles far from home have now crept into our state, our city and in some cases our neighborhoods. We are all rallying together to do our part for humanity, to hunker down, change the curve and prepare for what the media, the experts, the president… tell us is on the horizon.

The rapid spread of the Coronavirus. Where did it come from and where is it headed next? How do we cure it and stop the spread? How can we know more?
And pretty soon we are found a chaotic, anxious mess of humanity in search of what lies beyond our comprehension. We buyout surgical masks on Amazon and then shy away from those wearing them as if they are carrying the plague rather than trying to prevent it. We turn to our government… our president… to answer a health crisis when He is likely the least qualified person to discuss public health and an epidemic. We place too much hope and security in truths that the world can offer us… quick answers, vaccines, cures, evidence.

The gift that is wrapped up in Proverbs 25 is the reminder that some things are for God to know and us to trust Him.

When the final category was announced and the envelope was opened, I think everyone including the recipient was blown away at the result. Parasite? A foreign film with subtitles won our American Oscar’s. To say the winner was unexpected is an understatement. Some may even call it unfair or undeserved because it was a foreign winner in a National award ceremony.
But isn’t that how life works? Sometimes the most unlikely or underserved seem to be #winning? Do you know that person who denounces Christ, lives for self and gives very little thought to others, yet seems to score big at anything they touch?