When the Coffee Date Won’t Fit

How is it that.. sometimes our greatest strengths can become our greatest weaknesses?

Ok, so here's the real life scenario.. it's Friday morning with the weekend stretching out ahead of me.  We've got a fun things scheduled & I'm tweaking a few ? marks to see what is actually going to come together ... Getting together with friends tonight, tomorrow morning early leader's meeting for my bible study with an additional "fellowship" following.. company coming for dinner at 5.. Sunday free :)

Sounds like a pretty full weekend as it is.. and these are the scheduled things.. not including the "to do's" and Saturday projects.  A thought comes to my mind.. quite a few Saturdays, it works out to be a perfect time after my leaders meeting to get together with one of my bible study gals for a coffee date.

One my gals comes to my mind, "Yes, it would be great for us to connect!"  I see her smiling face and think how good it will feel to be sharing soul to soul ... "I should text her and see if she wants to meet!" I hear inside my head.

I think it was some sort of "guardian angel" jumping up inside me warning that just maybe that's not such a good idea.  The "boxes" of our weekend are already full as it is.  I feel a twinge of pain not grabbing my phone to send the invitation, but the scars of many previous occasions also send me a reminder twinge of the many times I have overfilled my days causing others & myself to pay dearly for it; leaving me standing in bewilderment afterward at how something good could go awry in the end.

You see one of my greatest gifts is connecting with people & organizing events.  When I have downtime, like when I was leisurely taking this walk, and the troubles and pressures of life quit suffocating everything else.. one of the first things that bubbles to the surface is ideas for events to put together and people to connect with.  That's how you know it's a true gift.  The swing side of that gift is the temptation to overfill the "boxes" of our life.

So today, I was victorious.  I did not pick up my phone.  I did not send that text invitation.  That coffee date will not fit this weekend & everything will be better for it.

"Freedom is not the absence of obligation or restraint, but the freedom of movement within healthy, chosen parameters."  Kristin Armstrong