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Dead Reckoning

by Adelle Gabrielson  •   Feb 9, 2011  •   11 Comments  •  
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I’ve been rather adrift this winter. The past six months have been challenging, to say the least.

I’ve suffered losses and disappointments aplenty.

Little things, nothing huge. But they kept piling up. Day after day, week after week, until I could no longer dig my way out of the pile.

And, on top of all of that, it rained a lot.

I felt adrift, off course. I had lost my fix – my point of reference. In navigation, a pilot uses dead reckoning to plot a course, using a single, stationary point. A fix.

I had gotten so buried under the daily mundane, I had forgotten what my fix was.

During that time, I wrote a lot about living in the now, and how I was going to stop feeling sorry for myself, and about being thankful.

Unfortunately, it was all just words…I meant what I wrote, but I wasn’t living what I wrote. I was writing the story I wanted to be living. I wrote what I wanted to feel, not what I was feeling.

I had lost my fix.

A wise friend once said that your disappointment is defined by the delta between your expectations and reality.

I have come to realize that I have Very. High. Expectations.

Of myself. Of my kids. Of my house. Of my work.

Perfection is an exhausting task master.

After not speaking to God for a while, (of course, that was terribly un-helpful to my situation) I opened up my Bible the other day and read this, hand-written in the margins.

If our goal is to be like Jesus…
Jesus = servant
Perfection = Jesus
Servant = Perfection

So, it seems to me that rather than striving (and failing) for perfection, maybe I just ought to be striving to be like Jesus.

A man.
Who made Himself nothing.
A servant.

I think I just found my fix.

By Adelle Gabrielson, ready…GO!…get set…

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