Starting Over Once Again

Typically, I’m a person that enjoys starting projects, but not very good at finishing them. I’ve tried everything from GTD, ZTD (like Getting Things Done, but with Zen as the first word), Franklin Covey and a host of others. Yet, I have little to no success in completing a project.

I’d like to think that it is a function of being an eternal optimist. Beautiful as that thought is, though, the issue is simply that I am lazy.

So, I thought a while before I titled something Starting Over because I find that I post something like it about every 10 months.

Still, there is something outside of me that is motivating the change this time: my son. He has really latched on to the idea that the food panty in our little church needs to feed other children. He consistently wants to bring food to it, despite what I might consider a lack of money.

On Sunday, he brought a box of pasta. This wasn’t the 98 cent box, but the stuff he likes – the comparatively pricey multi-colored, vegetable based pasta. At the store, he chose penne pasta for the pantry because that is his favorite.

This week, we are going to the store to bring about $30 groceries to the food pantry, partly due to his eager request. He has a list of things that are ‘missing’ that he plans to find at our local grocer.

I used to think about the Bible stories we read every morning and wonder if he understood what he read. Now, I wonder in the other direction. Today, he asked me to forgive him for having a hard heart.

A bit of context, we don’t say I’m Sorry much in our house. For things that are not purely an accident, we say do you forgive me for fill-in-the-specific-offense-here? I was expecting to hear Do you forgive me for disobeying you? When I heard him mention his own hard heart, I realized that he heard a lot more of the midweek last week than I thought. Family midweeks aren’t usually like that, but it was a surreal night for a lot of us.

Back to the point, I’m starting over again.

This time, I’m putting away my projects of teaching another adult class, work on the library and some of the Sunday Night service plans. My son wants to build a food pantry, so that is what we are going to do.

Together.