Project Maniacs

How many of you love projects?! I must admit I do. I have the ability to take the smallest job and somehow, somewhere, during the process, it steamrolls into an all -out major project. I come by it honestly though. My parents, my brother, my sisters...they are all project maniacs (I say this lovingly and respectfully guys). The difference between them and me is that they have yet to face their mania...they are still in the denial stage. I broke out of that stage sometime ago, but have not yet progressed to any other level of recovery.

Let me give you a little better picture of this monster. It starts with little things...my parents are going on a trip and because they are great parents and we are wonderful children (had to add that), we want to know where to find them during their month out of the country. Hence, comes the mini project...every mania starts small...they print out their full flight itinerary, then add all the telephone numbers of everyone they might be with. Then they decide to add to that the phone and cell numbers of us children including my sister's numbers in California and my brother's numbers in Alabama. While they are putting together the list they go ahead and add the grandchildren's cell numbers (you see how it has steamrolled into a project), because then we have a reference sheet for later use. Adding to that, and for our convenience, in case they need us to contact any one of their close friends, which is sometimes needed, they add their numbers also. Oh, I almost forgot, they also add the information on who is going to be picking them up from the airport (they usually fly out from Atlanta or Columbia). Please don't misunderstand, they are doing this for our benefit and we would not accept anything less and appreciate all the time and effort put into this but you see how I get it honestly...the simplest thing turns into a project for us!

My friend, Betty (Harley's mom), asked me this last spring if I could help with a project and help her make some cards for her youngest child's graduation. She wanted to give the whole class a handmade remembrance. Somewhere in the emptiness of what most people refer to as a brain, I was thinking that there were about ten posssibly twelve students (she goes to a small private school). I happily agreed and started on the preliminary concept. To make a long story short, we ended up making twenty-six, (there were a few more students than I had thought),YES, twenty-six covered tuna can graduation hats complete with confetti, candy, and gum inside the cans and a special scripture on ribbon that unfolded from the same said can. Also, no tuna can hats who be complete without a tassel on the top (you really have to see them to get the full picture). The list of necessary steps in making the hats was three pages long and they took us about two months to make. We put in about sixty dollars worth of material that luckily I already had. See, there again, a simple project steamrolled into project mania and poor Betty got sucked into the project abyss. I do wonder what happened to all those stately red and gold tuna can graduation hats. If anyone knows please contact the proper project authorities.

Ahhh, the stories I could tell ....my brother and his car and motorcycle projects, my sisters and their house and gardening projects, my mother and her boxes (hid under her bed in denial state) of projects...and the list goes on.
And again I confess that it comes quite honestly, as you can now see, but it comes in a teachable lesson for the here and after. What if I take some of that project mania that as been so well taught to me and put it to another very important project...the project of the living in the after. I can approach living in the after (the years of change ahead of me), with the same bulldog tenacity that I give to any of the other worthy projects that I have had over the years. I can look at the unknown ahead of me, which is so unnerving, as the blank paper in the sketch book where I am going to make my preliminary concept. As I open my sketch pad to a clean page I can proclaim this Psalm of David, saying, "Lord, my God , to you I lift my heart. In you I trust...Make your paths known to me, Lord, teach me your ways. Lead me by your faithfulness and teach me, for you are God my saviour; in you I put my hope all day long." Psalm 25:1-2a,4-5. With confidence that I DO trust God, (trusting isn't a problem, it is that sometimes we lose sight of that), and that he will lead me in His faithfulness, I can begin to draw the first lines of my project concept for life in the after. I am starting to feel those little stirring that come over me whenever I begin a new project. It is not quite excitment yet, but coming from the exceptional project maniac line that I do, I know it will not be long before, with my saviour beside me, I will have my bulldog teeth firmly planted in it. And we all know, from experience, that this will probably steamroll into something big and beautiful. Oh yes, project mania in the here and after!

mania/.denoting a special type of mental obesession or denoting extreme enthusiasm
maniac/.an obsessive enthusiast
*The above taken from "The Oxford Pocket American Dictionary"