Pressure to Perform

Have you ever walked by a room and enjoyed your children singing or dancing or acting?  When you stepped into the room to encourage them did they stop?  When you asked them to perform for Grandma were you met with sudden shyness and reluctance?

This morning as I am cleaning the house and fixing snacks and getting ready for a trip and organizing school I am feeling some of that reluctance.

People are starting to ask if we are ready.  Relatives are visiting tomorrow.  Someone is staying in the house while we are away.

Things that I would normally do I am now feeling the pressure to do in order to meet the expectations of others.  Or my perceived expectations of others.

The pressure to perform has more than once reduced to me a bucket of tears and inspired a total lack of motivation and self confidence.  Why is that?

A friend was visiting last week and told me the next day how blessed and encouraged she was by the fact that there was dust in my bathroom.  My first reaction – mortification.  Then I listened to her.  She was glad that she wasn’t the only one whose home wasn’t spotless and perfect.  In being fallible, in being real, I encouraged her to be real too.

I am a people pleaser.  I struggle tremendously when I think that I am going to let someone down.  I get stressed over deadlines.  The thought of someone waiting on me is painful.  As a mum, I try to be everything for everybody…and then I burn out.

Something I am learning – the hard way, incidentally – is that I need to do what needs to be done in order to serve the Lord.  In honouring Him, I will bless those around me.  I cannot be everything to everybody, it is not what God designed me to be.  He designed me to be a wife and mother and to love and serve Him.  I need to be a faithful steward of those things that God has given me but if I become a slave to them then I have missed the point.

New International Version (©1984)
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,

Colossians 3:23
New Living Translation (©2007)
Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.
 
Willingly, I need to serve the Lord.  The next verse in Colossians 3 sums it all up…

since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

Refocus today and center your energy and your devotion on God.  Others will see Him in you and that is far more valuable than a dust free bathroom.