Do you ever bite off more than you can chew – even though you know it might be a dumb idea to start, but you do it anyway? …. yea, well after not writing in this space for nearly a year and a half I jumped into this 31 Day Challenge, but I also decided to kick off the blog on my business website. So, I went from not writing at all – to writing on two blogs for 31 Days straight – just going to say it now, I fully know it was a crazy idea…

Anyway, on to a form how reflection. More like, a question to you – how do you reflect? I don’t remember if I’ve ever said it here or not and I’m not going to take the time to check right now. But for some reason, I’m in charge of technical stuff in our house. Now, my household is my two children & I, but we live in an apartment attached to my parents’ home. So, the two of them live on the “other side” of the house…

In this house we are 70, 68, 43, 19, and 16. It isn’t the 19 OR the 16 year old who are interested in keeping everything running or even know how to hook up the TV to the DVD or the Apple TV or the Kindle Fire Stick – no, I hook it up and they run the remotes. Remotes confuse me. They’re wireless, they don’t have cords so you can just look at the other end to see what is connected where. I’m a hands on, visual person. I require color to understand. Wireless doesn’t come with color. Much like apps versus using a real website – why?? I guess you could say I’m an old fashioned technical geek? So… on those notes. Today I’m going to reference the post I posted on the other site’s 31 Days | Virtual Organizing. Today is on Save or Save As. As I wrote on my other blog (& so far all of the other posts too) I keep thinking how true this is in life as well. I find it interesting how our humanness penetrates everything, even technology – I’m going to attempt to explain my rambling.

To save a file in the computer, or a memory in your mind or your child’s mind. You simply save. It will stay named as-is, and the location will remain where-is. This happens naturally without much effort – in fact if you use Google Docs, or other Cloud based drives it will automatically save for you without you even telling it to “save”.

This is great, it can be super helpful, but it also can completely fill up your drive space with a whole lot of nothing of value. Think about all the auto saves when you’re writing an email. Have you ever tried to search and you find like 150 of the same email because it’s every version from the time you started writing to the time you sent it (or is it just me who can take hours to write an email?)

Back to memories, you naturally hang onto a lot. In addition, look how easily we can take photos of anything to “remember” it, but is this always helpful or can all of the “saves” bog down our memories? Especially since the saving happens as-is, where-is. Think about all the times our children upset us or we upset them. If every hurt is saved, our heart, mind, and soul get bogged down. We have to let things go – or “re-file” them where they belong.…which is where we can use a “Save As” in life.

To Save As, you make a deliberate choice. You don’t accidentally Save As.
Praise is a Choice.

Save As is when you save a file to make a duplicate – but you have to change the file name or location. You can’t have two exactly the same in the same place. Just like you can’t have two people have the exact same memory of an event – the memory’s location is different (two different people’s heads). And one person can’t have two different accounts of the same memory. I believe this is where perspective & expectation come in.

As a single parent our perspective is different than other friends who are also parents, or other friends who are single and not parents (besides the obvious of we are all different) – where do we fit? I believe it is our expectations that really get us into trouble though. Please don’t get mad at me, but I wonder – is single parenting harder or is it just different than our expectations?

My perspective on married life growing up = when you got married it was for life. One decision, repeatedly pre-decided to stay together many times. Yes, it would take work. No, it wouldn’t always be easy.

My expectation was based on the belief we were raised similarly in Christian homes, my expectation was based on he actually meant what he said. I had no concept of the effects of alcohol. I had no concept of what abuse looked like other than hearing (reading in a book) about someone with obvious bruises. I had no concept of the hurt in me from previous abuse, which completely tainted my perspective.

I needed a “Save As” as badly as most days I need an “undo”!

To “Save As”, is to know you’re going to save something – but you want it in a different location and/or a different name. Praising the LORD’s name works like a “Save As” in life. When we focus on Him, our perspective will change to line up with how He sees us.

Please don’t get me wrong – I am not saying single parenting is easy. I know it isn’t! I’m also not saying “fake it ’til you make it” – honestly, I’ve begun to wonder if that is a lie from the pit. I do need to choose to Praise Him, I do need to choose to put one foot in front of the other many days, but these aren’t the same as faking everything’s okay today.