Sometimes the Small Blessings Are the Biggest

One of the interesting things about being self-employed and setting your own schedule is that sometimes you have to tell yourself to take a break.

I get a little tired of squinting at this screen sometimes, but I actually really enjoy the dynamic of working as a freelance writer. This laptop is my “office”, and I can literally work anywhere there is a Wi-Fi signal. As I’ve done my due diligence the past year and a half, I’ve accumulated more writing assignments and opportunities, adding even more flexibility.  I love the fact that if I need some extra money, I can just sit down and write more stuff. 🙂

At the same time, there’s a temptation not to take a day off now and then, or to allow pressures to dictate the timing of when I choose to write.  This is where some discipline is needed.

Yesterday was a challenging day in several ways.  I won’t bore you with details because it was nothing serious–but let’s just say that like most people, there are certain things that go deeper into me emotionally than other things, and a series of negative events can take their toll on one’s courage if they are those types of things that hit the sensitive areas of the soul.  Several of those events hit my family and me yesterday, to the point that the timing for some of them seemed almost strategic–like they were designed to zap courage. If I gave you the details, you would agree that they were bummer things to happen, but you would probably find it silly that I would be emotional about them, just because you don’t have the same triggers that I do.  But for me, they hurt more than just being the inconveniences that they were. Besides that, I think I’m probably even more emotionally sensitive than normal, explainable by the previous post.

At any rate, the consequence for some of these things was that they caused some unexpected expenses, and perhaps as part of my need to regain control, I came into the coffee shop this morning determined to skip my Sunday morning blogging and dig into some writing assignments to make up the difference.  I know blogging is also writing, and while I write for (somewhat of) a living, this blog is a different kind of writing for me.  I value this time, because it’s therapeutic and relaxing to process my thoughts here. But I was going to skip it today. I spent money that wasn’t in the budget, dangit, and I was going to make up for it by doing work-related writing.

So when I sat down just a few minutes ago and checked my email, I discovered that a friend had given me a small gift by PayPal, a friend with no clue of what had happened yesterday.  It was exactly enough to cover the extra money that I had spent, the extra money that I was going to try and earn back today. Almost to the dollar.

Just as the timing of yesterday’s events seemed strategic, the timing of seeing that money show up seemed even more so. It was as if God literally bought my time back, so I could sit here and blather on this blog about it instead of write a bunch of other stuff I could probably care less about. Again, it seems almost silly when I think about it, but it spoke to my soul, and it hit me in the same emotional spot where all the bad stuff hit yesterday. To some it might seem a small gift, but it was the right thing at the right time.  I’ve been fighting back the tears the entire time I’ve been writing this.

Sometimes the small blessings are the biggest. Just saying.