I’m waiting for God to give me an answer and I super suck at that.

I don’t really operate on God’s time.  I have this idea that prayers should be answered instantaneously, like a genie.

I have a parent who is deeply upset with me.  She misunderstood my bumbling attempt to help her daughter and is now demanding some sort of reckoning.  This happens with people.  We think what we are saying is totally clear and not contentious but those same words are received as vague and threatening.  It is so easy to take things in the wrong way.  And here, when I tried to say “how can I give your daughter the best education possible” the parent heard “your daughter is a bad child and doesn’t belong in my class.”  I’m so overwhelmed by this mess that I feel utterly directionless.  I’m so afraid of making it worse that I can’t see how any option is even remotely good.

So I’m trying to pray about it.  I’m asking God to show me what to do, to give me the right words to make my intention clear and have the best outcome for my student.  I have been praying on and off about it all day.  And I don’t have an answer yet.  I just have the overwhelmed and the rising panic that maybe there is no answer.  Maybe I’ve ruined things beyond repair.

(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I do tend to overreact to things.  How did you know?)

I have to relax.  I have to let God work with me on his schedule.  And I do have to not jump to “well I just have to say SOMETHING, even if it’s not the right thing” because that won’t help anyone.  If I am patient and trusting the correct outcome is possible.  (And now I will repeat this to myself about a million times.)

This leaves me sitting in the overwhelmed, having to face the waiting.  For years I didn’t do this.  I drank.  At the slightest instance of personal discomfort, or answerless-ness I ran to the bottle.  At the end of a bottle of wine I could convince myself it was all someone else’s fault and they were just being an asshole.  At the end of two bottles of wine I could pitch myself over the self-pity cliff, bemoaning how the world had treated me so unfairly and I shouldn’t be so persecuted.  By the end of the third bottle of wine I would pass out and well, can’t think much at that point, can ya?

But tonight, as much as I remember how much comfort I thought I was getting from drinking away the day, I don’t want to drink.  I don’t WANT to feel like I do right now, frightened and powerless, but I don’t want to be angry, maudlin and self destructive.  I don’t want to pretend that I bear no responsibility in my own life.  When I look at the alternatives to the overwhelmed, I think I can hack the overwhelmed.

At least I can with the aid of the emergency chocolate bar I have stashed in my kitchen.  And an episode or two of Revenge.  God will answer me, when He’s ready.  I just have to be sober to hear him.

(1 Year and 24 Days Sober)