My Bad Habit

I have a bad habit and it consumes me with guilt at times.

My crime-not finishing what I start. I have about four half read books laying around my house. My sons rooms has clothes piled high on his dresser from when I started to box up his outgrown clothes and I never finished. Every year on my children's birthday's I write in a journal. I tell them every silly thing they said or did that year. Foster-well he's been two for 5 months now and I still haven't written in his this year. I will write letters, only to find them a month later sitting on a shelf having never been mailed. I started to read my daughter a long chapter book last summer and never finished. If you look around my house right now, you will see an entertainment center piled with picture frames from where I started to take down old pictures to replace them with new ones-only I haven't replaced them yet. I'm still waiting to get up the energy to order the pictures I want. I have a wardrobe full of half finished sewing, crocheting and knitting projects. What I don't understand is, when I was in the "working world," I was always consumed by "getting the job done!" Why can't I be this way at home? I'm still in the "working world" just a different line of work!

"Why am I like this?" I often ask myself. It is not a good example for my children (that is where most of my guilt comes from). Luckily, in this area of life, I have a polar opposite as a husband. He makes our children finish whatever book they have started-even if they get two chapters into it and find they hate it. Every Saturday, they clean their room on routine, not having a chance to start to pick up and then walk away. Our daughter knows before cracking open a book or starting a project-she must finish it. She takes more time to ask herself if its something she really wants to do-while I just follow whatever my heart says that day.

There have been so many times where I have been reminded of something else I need to go finish and I feel so guilty. Why am I so easily distracted and unable to finish the simplest of things? In the midst of feeling like such a failure, the Lord reminded me-He is not like that with me. He doesn't give up on me if I get too stubborn or boring or if something else more interesting comes along. He doesn't cast me aside to the reject pile when I stray too far from Him. I will never be put in a closet full of half finished projects like myself; nor will I ever be placed on some "To Do" list.

His Word promises us in Philippians 1:6, "being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Oh thank you Jesus! How I will strive to be more like You and less like my sinful nature. Thank you for loving me despite all of my many faults.