But, that's not what I meant...

Found this in my drafts from 18 months ago. I still think of this moment often:

A couple weeks ago my daughter asked if she could paint under the table. I said sure, thinking she’d either take her canvas under the table or paint the underside of the table, both of which I was fine with.

No, no. Literally, under: a spread of pink tempura paint showed up on my floor, directly under my table.

“That’s not what I meant,” I told her.

“But mommy, I was making it sooo beautiful,” she said.

How many times have you “ordered” a blessing? You’ve prayed or asked for something to happen a certain way, or for someone to be a certain way, and you wait, hands in lap, expectantly, knowing it’s going to arrive just how you asked for it.

Except answered prayers don’t always come in the form we expect. And it’s not like the meal you ordered that came with the wrong side dish; you can’t send the answered prayer back to the kitchen with a cringed look on your face, kind of apologetic, and wait for your new blessing.

We pray and hope and work for things that we want. We receive blessings and bad days and more blessings. Sometimes--once in a blue moon, as far as I've ever experienced--those blessings arrive *precisely* how I’ve imagined they would. Most of the time they arrive quite differently than how I pictured they would come. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes I utter, "That's not what I meant," and I have to dig a little deeper to find the gratitude I know I should be feeling. 

When the item is a consumable, rearranging the situation or our perspective can be easy. Not so with non-consumables, such as a job, a new friend, or a change you’re hoping to see in your marriage.

Life can be HARD. And there is no planning for the curve-balls. At least in baseball you know when a pitch is coming so even if it's a curve-ball, it's half predictable. In life, the pitches come ready or not and you hope you're ready, and if you're not ready then hopefully your helmet is on when it comes down the line.

So much of life in 2020 is customizable, that when blessings don't arrive as ordered, we are a bit thrown off our game and maybe even a little ungrateful. And the answered prayers and the blessings we receive on a daily basis can sometimes resemble curve-balls. They do not always have a halo of light surrounding them to let us know that we're staring down a good thing.

Maybe if we open our eyes and our hearts, shift our perspective just a little bit, the blessings that arrive differently than we thought they would just might become the shining moments of our days.