When Life Punches You In the Face

“Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face”.

Muhammad Ali

Hello Everybody! How are you doing? Me? I had plans this week: plans to get my carpets done and my bathroom wallpapered and to finally get my schoolroom in good order, amongst other things….so many plans.

To be honest, I actually managed to get a lot accomplished this week.

I cleaned my carpets (my, they needed it!) and began my wallpapering project (something I have never done before) — but life just started happening (as it tends to do) and somewhere in the middle of my week, it all kind of went sideways.

Does that ever happen to you?

First, it was the light switch in my bathroom, which decided to only begin to work at random hours — and finally, not at all.

If you couldn’t guess, I’m no electrician, but thank goodness for YouTube.(Shout out, all you handymen with time on your hands to film yourself fixing things. You’ve saved me time and money on numerous occasions!)

There went half a day of time I had intended for my wallpapering project. The good news is I actually fixed my light switch and I wasn’t electrocuted in the process. (big bonus!)

So back I went to my wallpapering project, and wouldn’t you know it, as I started hanging this lovely wallpaper, the awful reality that my trim was in bad shape began to make itself evident.

And then I couldn’t help but notice that toilet paper dispenser and towel ring that had been broken off my wall for the better part of a year — it just wouldn’t do with the elegant paper I was currently attempting to hang on my walls.

No, no, no.

Needless to say, painting and hardware projects that were not part of the original plan, now became a part of the new plan — the new and improved plan!

Lord have mercy, will it ever stop?! Likely, no.

So, the new plan began: all the painting and hanging of bars and dispensers and it lasted an entire 4 hours before an entirely new and unexpected plan emerged — again!

The new plan involved throwing all my plans out the window and running into a school gym with my littles and assessing the state of my middle daughter’s seriously swollen ankle.

This is where the Muhammad Ali quote came to mind:
“Everybody has a plan, until you get punched in the face”.

I had my plans, people, and they were fine plans.

They were plans to help me feel more on top of my scattered life. They were plans to create a little space where I could start my day in a lovely place that I could (mostly)call my own — a space where no looming projects stared back at me and begged to be handled at the beginning of each new day.

But life — life had another plan.

And so, I just had to adjust to the new plans: carrying kids who happened to have grown taller than me into cars (when did that happen?), consulting doctors and calling to ER’s for the most economical and prudent way to help my daughter figure out what was the actual damage of the evening’s scrimmage.

It was the new plan and I just had to roll with the punches.

I just had to dig deep and do this thing called “momming” and do it to the best of my abilities.

I needed to throw all my grandiose plans out the window and glance upwards to Heaven and say, “Now what?”.

You know, life with kids is never, ever boring and maybe I don’t get accomplished all the “to-do’s” of my day, but I have six amazing kids to show for all of my thwarted plans.

I’ll take them any-day over getting exactly what I want when I want it.

I’ll take my 6 kids and all their unexpected setbacks, and I’ll take my college-age daughter calling me in the midst of all of that with her own challenges of embarking on her Freshman year in a place that is entirely new to her.

And did I mention that my parents were coming into town to celebrate a 6 year old’s birthday and I had to throw all my plans for a clean house and a warm dinner as they arrived and gifts neatly wrapped and ready for the weekend out the window, too?

The good news is: no broken bones and we are all making it through the challenges of our week. Hooray!

I know I’ll recover from all of the setbacks of the week and manage to eventually get all the things done that need to get done — and to let go of the rest of the stuff, because it really didn’t need to get done in the first place.

I’ll learn, because I am a mom of 6 kids, and that’s what mom’s of six kids do: we learn to make it through and trust that God isn’t trying to torture us when things go wrong.

Hopefully, when the hard weeks come, we have matured enough to realize that they have come because God is trying to help us learn something far more important than how to tackle our “to-do” lists like a beast.

Hopefully we have learned that His plans are better than our plans — because they are.

If we can keep our eyes on Him, we will eventually discover He is trying to teach us that love is inconvenient and that it doesn’t always go as planned and it can even be quite painful — but it is worth it, nonetheless!

Because it is worth it.

Every little bit of suffering and inconvenience is worth it. Every little bit of my plans going to Hell in a hand basket — worth it!

Muhammad Ali understood something that can be applied to life in a family: everybody has a plan — until they get punched in the face.

But how you respond, when the punches come, is what separates you from the other guy.

It’s what proves that this thing called “grace” is real and it will help you to take those punches and somehow grow stronger, because of them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is the grace of this Christian life will help you to face the punches of day — and love your life anyway.

At the end of the day, you won’t look back on the inconvenience of all those punches in the face with sadness, as long as you tried your lousy best to love God and the people around you, through it all.

You might even find yourself marveling at the way God brought you through every punch and gave you the strength to get up and brace yourself for the next one and to say, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me”.

Because you can.

More than that, you can actually do it with a smile and a chuckle and the will to keep moving forward, knowing that there is nothing you can’t handle with Him at your side.

And that, my friends, is what you do life punches you in the face.

So here’s to our big, beautiful unpredictable lives that are far more exciting and meaningful than we could have ever imagined, once upon a time, when all we cared about was ourselves.

Hooray for life in a big family!

It’s never boring, I can say that for it — and who really wants a boring old life where you can control everything, anyway?

Not me! I’ll take my big crazy life with my husband and 6 kids, a life that always keeps me on my toes.

I’ll take this big, beautiful “punches keep coming” kind of life anyday.

How about you?

Till next week (where hopefully there will be a few less punches in the face) signing off and bracing for impact.

Godspeed, good people!

Sharing over at Kelly’s