Baggins / Tookish

I often wonder what is wrong with me.
I can’t figure out how I end up doing the things I do.
I am puzzled as to how I get so intertwined and enmeshed with my work, that things at home get set aside.

What is it about me that can’t be content as a stay-at-home mom?
Why do I seem to need more?
Why isn’t ministering to my children enough for me?

There are aspects of my work that I don’t even like, tasks that require me do things I would never volunteer to do. I would never volunteer to stand before a church congregation or an entire school assembly and make a presentation. Yet I have done both in the past two weeks. I feel nervous, challenged, and uncomfortable a lot of the time with this new job. I could quit, but I can’t. There is something deep inside me that likes this uncomfortable feeling, that wants to be challenged and needs to feel nervous and uncertain.

Maybe I am like Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Perhaps if I were to cross paths with the magician Gandalf he would tell me, “There is more to you than you know.” Gandalf knew that there was more to Bilbo’s sedentary Baggins side. Bilbo was also from the swashbuckling Took side. His blood was a mingling of both Baggins and Took.

The best comparison I have would be the knowledge that I am made in God’s image; both human and divine, both of this earth and of heaven. This mysterious union is one that seems to always lead me down odd paths, around curves and into places I would not go of my own choosing. But much like the Took side of Bilbo that made him trade in his walking stick for a sword and sent him on many adventures, something “Tookish” calls to me, awakes the divine in me and leads me on challenging adventures.

Sometimes I think about how much easier it would be to stay comfortably at home taking care of the ordinary activities of day to day life. I seem to live in this constant tension between human and divine, earth and heaven. Yet just as I start to settle down into a mindset that has me snug, at home, and feeling comfortable, I am once again called out. I am called out of the comfortable, called out to see more, to experience more, to help more, to minister more.

There is a scripture somewhere in the bible ( I don’t know exactly where) that talks about “my soul thirsts for you, my God”.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with me at all.
Maybe I am just thirsty.
Maybe I should quit being puzzled.
I should stop wondering why.
I should accept that, just by chance (or by the grace of God) that I am okay.

Some days I will pick up my “Baggin’s”walking stick and some days I will strap on the “Tookish” sword. But every day I will try to live as God made me, in His likeness.