Weigh In #23

My 14 month old son got conjunctivitis (aka pink eye) last week. If you've never had a bad case of it you don't know that the gunk that your eyes produce to try to get the infection out continues to build up even when your asleep. The result in the morning is that your eyes are effectively glued shut. The first time I recall that it happened to me I was about 12 years old. It freaked me out for a couple of seconds and then I, painfully, pried open an eye and made my way to the bathroom where I then rinsed up and took care of the other eye.

But my boy, only a year old remember, really freaked out when he woke up and could not open his eyes. I'm talking blood curdling, top of the lungs, makes a parent cry to hear it, screaming. It took a few minutes of my wife and I working together to get his eyes cleaned up and opened. It took him longer to get back to a somewhat calm state.

I've been thinking about what he was feeling some this morning because I think I react like KC did a lot more often than I care to admit. No, I'm not talking about screaming and wailing until someone rushes in to take care of me. I'm talking about reacting to a short term situation as if it was permanent. KC didn't know what I knew on Saturday morning. He didn't know that he would be able to see again in a few minutes. He was confused and his world had changed in a way that he didn't like and couldn't control.

And I did the same thing this morning. When I stepped up on the scale to do my weekly weigh in, I had a one year old's reaction. I saw the number was 2lbs higher than last week's number. It was

268.0

What?!? No! It can't be? What about all the hard work I've put in? This is a disaster! I was doing so good. Now I'll never get to my goal. I'll be right back where I started! This is the most terrible thing that could happen....

Like I said, the reaction of a one year old. Not rational. Not mature. Not even rooted in reality.

And I felt like that for a while. My temporary condition taking hold of me as if it was the only thing in my world. But then, as I was doing my daily inout and review on LiveStrong.com, I looked at the graph of my weight over time (the image at the top of this post). And the reality of the situation began to assert itself.

This is a small blip. It is a temporary thing. I can move forward from this with out a loss of all my progress. The graph helped me frame today's events in a large scope of vision. And it really helped.

I know there's a lesson in here somewhere about letting today's trials overwhelm a lifetime of blessings but I can't seem to crank the words out right now. I'll leave off writing today with the knowledge that God's got a much broader scope of vision than I do and I would do well to depend on His view more than mine.

Peace.