Only Today

The sign reads like an anagram my brain can’t help but solve. A riddle set before me the day our adventure detoured through Disneyland Paris, and left unsolved until this day in Germany. Three weeks into our journey. I see the picture now, and read “Adventure Lies . . .” as if God had placed my family right underneath that “Adventure Isle” sign for this day instead of that one. This day when I can see the riddle, solve the anagram, rearrange the letters. So that I can remember that this is an adventure. The adventure of a lifetime, really. Even in the thick of weary and unknown.

It’s easy to forget that I’m on an exciting adventure when I go to bed weary every night. It’s exhausting trying to figure out life in a country I have only just begun to explore and whose language I am only now just learning. Right now, nothing comes easy. Not the laundry or the grocery-getting or the measuring or figuring out what temperature to bake my cookies on. Nothing. Comes. Easy.

I find myself working my way through this adventure day-by-day. Sometimes it leads straight through wheat fields and into a quaint and beautiful German village in the hills. Other times it leads to the basement wasch-maschine and its foreign-language instructions, complete with celsius grade temperature readings.

And when I enter a public setting, the adventure in my spirit feels more like a dreaded run up a hill. I kind of tense up and hope that nobody talks to me, and hope that somebody talks to me — all at the same time. Because I will likely not understand what they say and I so desperately want to. I find myself working to avoid public settings from a right-in-the-middle-of-it kind of way. This is new for me. Instead, I’m trying to soak it all in, listen to as much German as I can and try, try, try to understand even a word in a conversation between two strangers. (And so the adventure leads me to eaves-dropping in whole new ways.)

My kids are doing awesomely. Truly amazing all day. They get along so well, thanks to God’s amazing and completely undeserved grace. And they love the lazy of summer in this foreign land. But bedtime comes, and it’s not so easy. Ever. For there are new sounds, new bugs, new shadows to get used to. And it wearies me more. And bedtime is a difficult time to see the adventure for what it is. So by the time I go to bed each night, I am ready for the soft of the great big square European-sized pillow that I will be taking home with me (make no mistake!).

Unless I think about tomorrow. That’s when the adventure turns sour in my mind, and I want to throw in the the Handtuch and go home. If I let even one glimmer of “How in the world am I going to wake up tomorrow and do all of this again?” enter into my weary-minded state of being at the end of a day, the weary turns to worry and the pillow feels like rocks.

And so each day, each night, I realize in a whole new way the how-to-live-today-and-not-worry-about-tomorrow thing that God has been trying to teach me for ever so long. I am learning that today is all I have the strength for. And that’s okay. Because I don’t have to do tomorrow yet. Only today. I am learning to trust that God will give me whatever energy, strength, determination I need for tomorrow’s part of the adventure  just like He gave all I needed to get through today’s.

And in letting myself forget about how to do tomorrow, I find a new way to rest and a new way to live. I find new things to adventure in. I find all sorts of beautiful that I otherwise would not have had the energy or the eyes to see. Because I can put my every ounce of everything into what God has given me for right now.

Even if it does involve a bottle full of something that I hope is laundry detergent and a washer laden with instructions I do not completely understand.

Perhaps today the adventure will bring suds?