The next right thing...

For years now, I have lived by one particular phrase. I have repeated it a thousand times, and I share it often with anyone who is facing difficulty or pain. The reality is that anyone who has faced loss...grief...knows what it means to need this phrase...the bottom level on the grief spectrum is a very dark, cold room. If you are like me, then you have laid on the floor of that room and heard your own cries echo off the walls...demanding life to go back, rewind,  "make it not so"...if you have been there...then you have lived this concept as well...it goes like this  "Just do the next right thing in the next 30 seconds". As you progress through the grief process, you might be able to change that into "in the next 5 minutes" and then eventually "in the next hour", and so on...but, what I am realizing in my life today...is that this can apply to not just grief...but, monotony...what Katrina Kenison calls "Dailiness" and what Ann Voskamp speaks of while standing in endless piles of laundry in her book "One Thousand Gifts".  Life goes on...and some days, finding the joy is easy...my soul seems to be tuned to it...primed and ready. I have more moments like this than I ever did in my life before. Sunlight streaming through a window, and a small boy gazing in wonder at the dust particles dancing in those rays. That will yank you out of monotony in an instant, so long as you are paying attention. And, that is where the phrase comes into it...paying attention. Because, on the other side of life there are the grey days...the days when I am so tired that I claw my way up out of sleep...feeling it tangled around me like heavy nets under water, dragging me down, as I struggle to rise and finally burst through the surface gasping for air(and some of you wonder why I am not a morning person!) followed by forcing my feet up the stairs for that first cup of coffee and the quiet that I must have... to just be, to fully wake up and sit at God's feet and just breathe before starting my day...days when it is cold and dark outside, and, the laundry has piled high, and the cat box needs to be cleaned and the babies are crying over *everything*,  the phone rings too loud and dogs bark and my coffee cup crashes to the ground...dark liquid sanity splattered everywhere...and I just want to crawl back into bed...back under those heavy nets and let them take me down. Those are hard days...days when there is no real grief, only life. SO much life. Same old, relentless life...it is then that doing the "next right thing in the next 30 seconds" becomes my oxygen.  My access to hope. Those words become the only path to really feeling anything on the hard days. Those words lead me through the grey...to sparkling raindrops...and looong dark eyelashes...and the curve of a little mouth...adorable even when turned down in a pout. 

 And, then other words surface in my memory, words like"In 10 years this will not matter...heck, tomorrow, this will not matter, just breathe". Do the next right thing. Next right thing, clean up the coffee...next right thing, get the babies settled in the play room, next right thing, check voicemail, next right thing, go sit on the floor and play with babies(cause they won't be babies forever). 

And, 30 seconds at a time...I can move through those days...and I may even find a sunshine moment in a toddlers eyes sitting on that play room floor with dark clouds outside...because I was looking...and it was the next right thing.