An upside-down day.

Yep. It got to me today. I'm sure you can identify--that day when some teeny-tiny bump in the road completely derailed you.

For me, it was pineapple upside down cake.
We currently have 68 to cook and clean for, and I was super excited to trade laundering sheets for baking cakes this afternoon--but those cakes ended up turning me upside down.

I was working on financial spreadsheets for groceries while the cakes baked. Someone came in with receipts and cash just as I was checking the cakes. That's when I somehow dropped the money down into the base of the oven. In a panic that I had just incinerated the grocery money-- I turned off the gas, yanked the half done cakes out of the oven,  and started dis-assembling the stove.
Also crying.
Yep. Me. Crying.

As it turns out, the money wasn't even warm, the cakes turned out just fine, and I laughed at how silly it all was. It was just that moment when it all hits you. All the noise and trash and lack of privacy and 18 hour days and new relationships and foreign language and lack of routine and and mosquitos and muddy towels and insecurities all come tumbling at you at once and turn you upside down.

And upside down is the trouble.

Sitting on the floor of the kitchen, tears in my eyes, with cash and cake and oven parts all around me--I thought, "My worth is not about cake-baking or spreadsheets. I am not more or less if I succeed or fail. I am worth what my God has paid for me, and that value will not change based on what I do wrong or right today."

I so often get things upside down.
I  try to start at the bottom with what "I can handle" and leave "just the hard parts" for God.
Upside down.
I try to start at the bottom and build my identity out of what I accomplish. Out of all the "ers" that I am, (teacher, sister, worker, leader, daughter...) and see God's ownership of me as just one part.
Upside down.
I try to build relationships around God instead of through Him.
Upside down.
I wait until the last minute to call on Him--instead of letting Him walk with me the whole time.
Upside down.

Now--it would be a better story if that one thought on the kitchen floor turned me right side up instantly. Which it didn't. Knowing something and feeling it are two different things.  But after some hugs from Jonathan and a walk in the cool afternoon air,  I did find myself right side up again.
And, after all, at the end of the day there was pineapple cake--which can set plenty of things right.