I have a song for everything. Ask my kids. I guess it’s a combination of preschool teacher, genes of the creatively bizarre, and the need we as humans possess at times to carry through frustrations with funnies.

I have in my repetoire everything from my trusty standby for toilet training (tune: Lollipop) : Potty check, potty check, oh, potty, potty, potty check…to utter nonsense phrases : Loddle doddle, loddle doddle la da da da doo…, sung while I scrub the tub or the toddler.

My twisted little favorite is one I mostly mumble under my breath during those most horrendous of days. Everything is collapsing in on me as I flit to and fro, hair drooping, dinner burning, three-year-old hollering, house groaning, nothing letting up or having the decency to get done in this half-remodeled kitchen, let alone in life.

 Now, it is not crisp, Britishy Julie Andrews cheer. Oh, no. Instead, I warble this rare ditty:

“Runnin’ around like a chicken with her head cut off, her head cut off, her head clean off! Ew! Chicken brains! Runnin’ around like a chicken with its head cut off all the live long day!”

OK. In my defense, I mentioned the creative bizarreness, didn’t I? Well, okay, then.

But, the point, Marisa? you ask, shaking your head at my profound weirdness. Well, folks, it’s this:

By the time I finish the song, stuff still kind of, sort of stinks.

Literally.

Dinner’s not full of delightful aromatic properties on charbroil, after all, and toddler is likely hollering because he had a lapse of memory about what the potty training song means.

BUT…

I am typically tittering to myself, shaking my head at my profound weirdness, and better able to deal with the rest of the mess for having poked fun at the situation.

I am big, emphatic even, on the struggle for self-confidence. But, a part of that comes by an odd source: the ability to laugh at oneself in the serious business of life.

To realize all those eventualities, the things that we are striving to do, to create, get done, and become will sort themselves out in time.

Without it, you become a pruny, prickly old bear, biting heads off at will. Not pretty, needless to say.

This house is no longer the Green Acres on acid it was a few years ago. One day, all hundred and ten years of her will gleam brightly on our end of country town Main Street.

Soon, I will hold in my hand a book with pages of my heart, my name on it, and that wonderful, old-fashioned book smell.

Someday, my kiddos will grow up and have even more grand successes. They are further on the road than heretofore.

Eventually, reality rises up to meet time.

Eventually, we get there.

We needn’t rush or overload our world with the do-it-have-it-alls.

Slooow down. Smile at the imperfect where-you-are.

All of the above mentioned, all your great ambitions, all of mine…they’re, well, great, and, if not great, at least, necessary.

Some, as a Christian, meant to spread the light.

And, while that is wonderful and needed and very much the Great Commission, in the broad scheme of things, even that eventuality will weigh us down with its demanding echoes if we let it, causing us to miss out on the only eventuality that counts in the end.

Jesus.

For, every other eventuality leads to the ultimate one we have in Him.

And, in the end, whatever else we do or dream of, while pretty darn significant sometimes, pales in comparison to what we have in Him, both now, and to come.

So, I think at these times, He calls on us to pause, to throw up our helpless hands, to chuckle with Him at our hurried little selves, and see what we sometimes are:

Silly chickens with our heads cut off, running to nowhere, when we ought to be running to Him.

So, on your busiest, most pulled-in-all-directions day, remind yourself of that.

Singing weird songs is optional.