Picture Perfect

Social media has always been a little bit frustrating to me because most of the time what you end up showing, or seeing, is a finished picture. And it usually looks pretty good! What you don’t get is the story behind that, what it took to get to that picture. So I want to shed some light behind a picture I posted on Facebook about 10 days ago, of this gingerbread soccer field I made with my husband…

I bought the gingerbread house kit around Thanksgiving – I love working on those things, and the one pictured on the box is a football field, so I thought it would be one that Jef would like doing with me. It did look pretty cool, definitely not like any of the other houses I’ve done before – way to go Target! I asked him if he would do it with me, and he said yes, I just needed to pick a time for us. I tried doing that, but when the time came, I knew we were supposed to work on the house, yet I felt like he didn’t want to do it. Was that true? No! But I made up all kinds of excuses in my mind about why he didn’t want to work on the gingerbread house. It made me pretty upset too. We didn’t end up working on the house that night. And even though Jef never said he didn’t want to work on it, I continued to make up reasons for why he didn’t want to do it as the days went on. At one point I told Jef I could give it away to friends and their kids could work on it, and he told me I could do that if I wanted to but he would do it with me if I really wanted that. This gingerbread house was torture to me – I even threw the boxed kit away, hoping that would end the strife that was going on for me in my mind. Thankfully, Jef took it out of the trash and it led to us actually sitting down and working on it. When it came down to actually spending time and doing something vulnerable with the man I loved, I found that to be really hard! To show him a side of me he had not seen before, and let my weak sides show. We had fun with the kit – I didn’t read the instructions right, but in the end it turned out looking really cool! Jef saw there were soccer goal posts and told me we should put those in it instead of the football goals – a neat picture to send to my dad, a soccer fanatic.

It can be hard to relax and trust what people say are true. Especially if you have been hurt in the past. I’m grateful that grace lets us keep trying, and doesn’t expect us to be perfect!