No Use Crying Over Spilled Tomato Soup.

Photo by Heather Schwartz on Unsplash

...Even when you spill it all over your beautiful Blessed Is She planner.

Because it was lying open on your coffee table and you just couldn't wait until after lunch to watch the 2017 finale of the Great British Baking Show on Netflix.

I'm embarrassed to admit how angry I got with myself for my over-confident bowl handing. I leapt up, grabbed a paper towel, began desperately rubbing the stains out of the pages, all the while saying many unkind things to myself.

"How could you do this, Sarah?!"

"Dangit, Sarah. You're such a spazz."

For the next seven months (I'll get a new planner in August), I'll have to write on pages rimmed with orange, all sad and waterlogged. And all because I'd forgotten Mom's cardinal rule to be extra careful not to spill red things. To keep superfluous items off of eating surfaces.

I could have kicked myself.

But then.

I remembered how my therapist has been speaking with me recently about self-compassion -- about learning to be kind to myself in those moments when I move automatically toward self-criticism.

Moments like, um, this one.

So I changed the way I was talking to myself.

"It's okay. You're only human, and sometimes humans spill things! Besides, you can still write in it. And, you know, you do write a lot of things in it, but you only spend a few minutes with it at a time. This isn't something that will ruin the rest of your life." I even tried to laugh at myself.

And it's not like it brought about an instant transformation. But I can't change the past. I can only change the way I speak to myself about a completely human mistake.

And -- I also thought of this: God wants to meet me in my mess, in a general sense. But usually I don't want Him there. So sometimes He has to force Himself in in a very literal way, I guess.

God wants to meet me in the ordinariness of my daily life, which is one of the reasons I was drawn to a Catholic planner in the first place. And what could be more ordinary than tomato soup splattered on its pages?

Long (melodramatic?) story short, I'll be okay.

I'll even try to smile when I open my planner every day for the next seven months.

Because God is still there, in all my mistakes and humanness. And He's there for you, too.