What if the Proverbs Woman Had a Pinterest Board?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

The warm water poured over me. The streaming drops felt like tears I could not cry. Without realizing it, I began to hum the words to the childhood nursery rhyme, “London Bridge is Falling Down”. How appropriate. Life is always falling down around me, it seems.

Only an hour before, my son and I had been reading from the book, Jesus Freaks, and praying to be both encouraged and encouragers. Our life is easy compared to the martyrs in the book. Embarrassingly cushy. After an hour spent in that book, we should be ecstatic with life for days on end.

The day began to intrude and remind me that life is real. And, pain is relative. I slumped with embarrassment at the frailty of my spiritual frame. My relatively simple pain never ceases to catch me no matter how hard and fast I run.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative 

Eyes stared back at me from the fogged up mirror. The woman behind the steamy haze was a stranger. How has it come to this despair so quickly in the day after so much determination to escape and remain free? I pulled myself together and collected my broken-hearted feelings from where they had fallen in a heap around my feet. “Just another day in Margaritaville,” I sighed.

The territory of my home and day awaited my conquering touch. A wry smile crept across my lips as I imagined the gall it would take to snap pictures suitable for Pinterest. I'd label the board, “Real Life”. 

I remember when I had a Pinterest-suitable life. It was the one before two kids. There was a small window of time, while I was in the nesting phase of pregnancy #2, that my home would have deserved pages in BH&G or Country Living. Neat, uncluttered, clean, light, airy. Of course it was! I was cleaning nooks and crannies of furniture with Q-tips and wiping down bathrooms twice a day.

I was running to keep up because I knew once Baby #2 arrived, I wouldn't be able to stay ahead of the game again till he was grown and gone. I'm a positive thinker like that. Thank Heavens it was back in the BP days: Before Pinterest. I had time to adjust to real life before fairy tale lives were laid out for all to see on virtual bulletin boards. 

As I surveyed the chaos that dots the landscape of my home with good bones, I thought of the kitchen re-do that never ends because there is only one of me and a finite amount of time. I looked at walls that still need paint and clutter that needs an ominous, warning visit from the folks at Hoarders. 

I closed my eyes and wondered, “What if the Proverbs woman had a Pinterest board?” 

Would her boards show the race to keep up with life? Would I see cranky, sick children fretting as she tried to clear her mind and consider a field? Would I see the frayed edges of temper from too little sleep too many nights in a row? Nights that ran into early mornings of meeting merchant ships from afar. Maybe I'd see loneliness in her eyes. Loneliness for a husband that has too much on his mind as he sits at the city gate to notice the light in hers until that light has gone out? 

Maybe she'd be fretting at the spindle and distaff because her aging eyes no longer saw the minute details of the work she could no longer do without help. In the midst of her industry, would she pin the struggle to balance business and family in a failing economy that requires more and more for less and less? Would she pin the sashes, scarlet, linen, and purple, so the rest of us could ooh and ahh and pin them to our 'someday' boards for the day we too could be trendy and stylish?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Perhaps the most pinnable of pins would be the picture no one would want to see. The one of her bent quietly in prayer at the feet of the one who sustains her when life is anything but pinnable. The most instructive pin of all would answer all of the “How did she do it?” questions we ask.

I move on about my day knowing as I try to create pinnable and picture perfect order, life will be real. Real messy. Anything but pinnable. In those messy moments when tears threaten to come like water from the shower head, I think of that Proverbs woman.

I will never have a pinnable life. But when all the pins have been pinned, I hope, I pray, my faith will have inspired and encouraged. I hope it will have been pinned and repinned over and over again in the lives of fraidy cats near and far. Because in the end, faith is the only pin that will remain. 

Courtesy B. Creasy - 2010

1 Timothy 6: 11b-12 (The Message)Pursue a righteous life—a life of wonder, faith, love, steadiness, courtesy. Run hard and fast in the faith. Seize the eternal life, the life you were called to, the life you so fervently embraced in the presence of so many witnesses.