Myers-Briggs

While browsing a blog post about the Myers-Brigg Type Personality test, I decided to take it again.  I know I've taken it before, but I couldn't remember what type I was so I logged on and answered away.  

ISFJ

Introvert(44%)  Sensing(12%)  Feeling(12%)  Judging(67%)

• You have moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (44%)
• You have slight preference of Sensing over Intuition (12%)
• You have slight preference of Feeling over Thinking (12%)
• You have distinct preference of Judging over Perceiving (67%)

This personality type was further explained at 16personalities.com

ISFJ STRENGTHS

• Supportive - ISFJs are the universal helpers, sharing their knowledge, experience, time and energy with anyone who needs it, and all the more so with friends and family. People with this personality type strive for win-win situations, choosing empathy over judgment whenever possible.
• Reliable and Patient - Rather than offering sporadic, excited rushes that leave things half finished, ISFJs are meticulous and careful, taking a steady approach and bending with the needs of the situation just enough to accomplish their end goals. ISFJs not only ensure that things are done to the highest standard, but often go well beyond what is required.
• Imaginative and Observant - ISFJs are very imaginative, and use this quality as an accessory to empathy, observing others' emotional states and seeing things from their perspective. With their feet firmly planted on the ground, it is a very practical imagination, though they do find things quite fascinating and inspiring.
• Enthusiastic - When the goal is right, ISFJs take all this support, reliability and imagination and apply it to something they believe will make a difference in people's lives - whether fighting poverty with a global initiative or simply making a customer's day.
• Loyal and Hard-Working - Given a little time, this enthusiasm grows into loyalty - ISFJ personalities often form an emotional attachment to the ideas and organizations they've dedicated themselves to. Anything short of meeting their obligations with good, hard work fails their own expectations.
• Good Practical Skills - The best part is, ISFJs have the practical sense to actually do something with all this altruism. If mundane, routine tasks are what need to be done, ISFJs can see the beauty and harmony that they create, because they know that it helps them to care for their friends, family, and anyone else who needs it.

ISFJ WEAKNESSES

• Humble and Shy - The meek shall inherit the earth, but it's a long road if they receive no recognition at all. This is possibly ISFJs' biggest challenge, as they are so concerned with others' feelings that they refuse to make their thoughts known, or to take any duly earned credit for their contributions. ISFJs' standards for themselves are also so high that, knowing they could have done some minor aspect of a task better, they often downplay their successes entirely.
• Take Things Too Personally - ISFJs have trouble separating personal and impersonal situations - any situation is still an interaction between two people, after all - and any negativity from conflict or criticism can carry over from their professional to their personal lives, and back again.
• Repress Their Feelings - People with the ISFJ personality type are private and very sensitive, internalizing their feelings a great deal. Much in the way that ISFJs protect others' feelings, they must protect their own, and this lack of healthy emotional expression can lead to a lot of stress and frustration.
• Overload Themselves - Their strong senses of duty and perfectionism combine with this aversion to emotional conflict to create a situation where it is far too easy for ISFJs to overload themselves - or to be overloaded by others - as they struggle silently to meet everyone's expectations, especially their own.
• Reluctant to Change - These challenges can be particularly hard to address since ISFJ personalities value traditions and history highly in their decisions. A situation sometimes needs to reach a breaking point before ISFJs are persuaded by circumstance, or the strong personality of a loved one, to alter course.
• Too Altruistic - This is all compounded and reinforced by ISFJs' otherwise wonderful quality of altruism. Being such warm, good-natured people, ISFJs are willing to let things slide, to believe that things will get better soon, to not burden others by accepting their offers of help, while their troubles mount unassisted.

It's interesting to me how right on my results are.  For the most part, I am supportive, reliable, enthusiastic, creative, and patient.  Those traits alone made me an excellent classroom teacher, I'm sure.  I've often said I am loyal to a fault. No surprise there.  And those weaknesses?  Oh! My! Wow!  Humble and shy...check.  Take things too personally...all the time. Check.  Repress my feelings so I don't hurt anyone else's...check.  Reluctant to change...um, yeah. Pretty much sums me up in a nutshell.  

Introvert, Feeling, Sensing, Judging. . .I agree with all but one.  Judging sounds so harsh, yet it's been the one thing I've been accused of.  Judging sounds completely unflattering and frustrating, but perhaps there is truth to it.  Here it is on a test I took--and I do tend to frown upon lives that are lived by breaking the law. . .either state law or God's law.  It doesn't have to be my way, but I am a rule follower, what can I say? 

I'm not sure why I chose now to look into this.  I'm putting it here in this space because maybe you can research what you are and how that plays into your life and the choices you make.  For me, on the precipice of forty, I'm becoming who I'm meant to be--all garbage aside.  I'm discovering the difference between acting out of obedience and acting out of obligation.  I'm finding my voice and saying no to the noise that distracts from the harmony we are trying to create in our home.  I'm being true to the desires of my heart and rediscovering what brings me joy outside of my role as wife and mom.  

The process of growing, changing, shaping, and becoming is a very gradual and deliberate one.  It entails looking at the map of your life: at the places you've been and the places you still want to go.  It's coming to peace with the fact that you're desires may look nothing like what others think they should.  It's cocooning yourself away from the discord so you can compose a symphony that explodes your personality and grows ten fold day after day.  It's the rush of the waves crashing against the beach as you let go of heartache and sorrow that has pulled you down under for far too long.  It's the examination of conscience that dissects past actions, people, circumstances that you have no control of but have allowed to dictate a space in the corner of your mind.  This process of growing, changing shaping, and becoming is simply the blossoming of the bud to the perfect, beautiful flower you were meant to be.  

Power in the Solo

I'm dancing this dance that I never expected to dance.
It's a solo.
I'm dancing to the music in my head, spinning and dipping and gliding across the floor of my imagination.
It's a beautiful thing really; this dance that just begged to be danced and who am I to say no?
 I don't care who's watching, I don't care what they are saying, I am totally at peace with who I am in this moment. . .swirling, spinning, dipping and gliding.
I have found myself lost in this moment.
There is power in this solo.

The music I hear with my soul.
Eyes up heavenward as I dance for His eyes only. . .
away from the shadows of doubt, or uncertainty, a sense of belonging to the only one who really matters.
I am a daughter of the King!
What is there NOT to dance about?
There is power in this solo.

For all those eyes who see but do not understand,
who speak just to hear themselves talk,
who tear down instead of build up. . .
I'm dancing and there is power in this solo.

For those who are too terrified to dance your own solo.
Do it anyways.
Just start moving and God will take care of the rest.
 Listen to the stirrings in your heart and the music in your soul will flow through.
There is power in this solo!

Front.
Center Stage.
There is power in this solo.
Dance your heart out. . .

Community and Communing

I've been thinking a lot about community again.  I work like this: I crave it.  I seek it.  I find it. I live it. Pause.  Repeat.  Currently, my community is cultivating growth in deep recesses of my heart.

And that is the story of my life.  And it has been such a good story to date.  A full one.  Pages inked with many faces and descriptive memories of our times spent together. Time well spent in a world that is fast paced and busy, busy, busy.  Long gone are those days of broken friendships, brought about by my own hand.  God has forgiven and rebuilt and refined me to know how to be a better friend, an intentional one. And it is good.

Except when it's not because sometimes it isn't.  Not all friends are meant to be a part of your village. They aren't all your people.  They are people who, for whatever reason, walk the walk with you for a while and then it's time to move them out because they take.  They question.  They belittle. They plot. They gossip. They are toxic.  No matter what you do, it will never be good enough or be enough.  And it is time.  And there is nothing that you need to feel badly about, nothing to blame yourself over; they were simply in your life for a season and the season has changed.

For someone like myself, who gives of my heart, who trusts easily and who genuinely tries to be nice to everyone. . .letting go of someone, regardless of the fact she is not good for me is hard. It's hard, but necessary and if I've learned anything by being faithful in His word, I can do hard things.  So can you.
And God has a way of working everything out for GOOD. . .(Romans 8:28)

Surrendering Motherhood. . .or Something Like that

Nothing like sitting and staring at a blank computer screen. . .it's not that the thoughts aren't there, but for whatever reason the words are hard to come by.  This particular computer sits still and powerless on most days.  Then when it hums to life I almost always  feel compelled to write.  This week is the first with all three in some version of school and extracurricular class.  It's strange how I long for the rhythm of a new normal and then when it gets here, and it's not what I expected it to be--I long for something more.  Such is our human heart, I guess.

In between catching up on last season's Nashville and folding loads of laundry after hours due to the extreme heat, I finished Surrendering Motherhood:  Losing Your Mind, Finding Your Soul by Iris Krasnow.  I'm not sure how I found this book, or more exactly, how this book found me.  The timing of its words, thoughts and deepest feelings resonated within me.  I'm still caught between two worlds:  working one day a week and being a full time mom.  For whatever reason, the first seems more valued and to get more respect.  As the year evolves into whatever it will be in my classroom setting, I'm even more aware of the choice that will most likely greet me come March.  A job share is probably no longer an option for my partner.  Her life is pulling her in the need to go back full time and a change is on the horizon.  I can't help thanking God that perhaps these past two years have just been preparing me for this moment: surrendering to motherhood and walking away.  For now.

I write this today, my loves more for me than you.  I write this today to gather my thoughts and to to reflect on them and to truly trust God's plan for this next part of my life.  I have taught other people's children for seventeen years.  I have loved what I do in my classroom for most of it.  What I haven't liked is all the garbage thrown at us from the state and government leaders that just suffocates our styles, stifles our passion, and discourages us to trust what our students need.  For as long as I can remember teaching has seemed as natural to me as breathing.  But now, my desire to pour into you, Bean, Bubba, and Nessa Bessa is what drives me.  It's what wakes me up each morning to come to God with my cup of coffee, bible, pen and paper.  Every day starts with the realization that I must rely heavily on Him and His plans for us that day. Random verses pop into my head and serve as reminders, "Do ALL things without complaining and disputing. . .SHINE as lights in the world"--Phil 12:14-15
 He is with me in all that I do.  He is calling me to be here.  To live fully and intentionally with the gifts He has given me: each of you. 

And so, I think about what it might be like to turn in a resignation letter come June.  It would be my first. I allow myself to entertain the thought or idea of working with someone else only one day a week.  And then I just give it to God...trusting Him, His will for my life.  And I read words from a book that has found its way into my home and know His intentions were for me to read things like: 

"When you stop to be where you are, then your life can really begin." (151)

"For most of my life I had been so busy becoming, I never experienced what I had when I had it." (159)

"My kids have captured me, and I am surrendering.  I am no longer mine.  I am theirs."  (160)

"I was avoiding my work at home.  I was avoiding looking into the eyes of sons who wanted everything and feeling that if I kept giving to them I'd have nothing left for myself."  (168)

So many days, as much as I enjoy this life at home I'm internally trying to figure out the next part--much of which includes at least some sort of work in a part time setting--if for nothing more than to have job security. . .just in case.  The reality?  Daddy was injured at work this year.  Financially we survived.  Emotionally we thrived.  What's the problem then?

". . .my work was becoming shallow; my child filled me up.  So why couldn't I finally, after a twisted, endless journey, be a wife and mother and be happy at that?  It was everything I had ever wanted, why wasn't it enough?" (101)

And why did I still listen to other voices?  What about retirement?  A bigger house?  More this?  Less that?
"Respect your own judgement, even if it means ignoring theirs."  (105)  

That's easier said than done for me. . .but maybe it's part of God's calling on my life for now.  To let go of the chatter I hear around me and focus on His voice, His plan, His path. . .

This last verse spoke to me.  I've had a plan for so long. . .been building myself up to be a reputable teacher and eventually a counselor--that the journey hasn't been so incredible as of late.  Because honestly, my goal kind of shifted ten years ago when I became a mama. 

"Real freedom comes from knowing exactly where you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to be doing. (201)  Prison is not knowing where you are going and forever trying to get there." 

I don't want to be stuck between two worlds anymore.  I don't want to make excuses about my choice to be in the home versus the work place.  I don't want to take on too many other tasks to feel valued or to affirm that I am somebody.  I am daddy's wife.  I am your mom.  That is enough.