My "Nanny" (my maternal grandmother that we lived with growing up) was an amazingly creative woman.  She knit, crocheted, embroidered, tatted, grew her own fruits and vegetables and cannned them just for starters.  One of the things I remember most about her was that she always had a yarn basket at her feet and it was always a mess!  When it was as its worst, she would grow increasing frustrated as she tried unsuccessfully to separate a skein of floss from a ball of crochet thread that had wrapped itself around a ball of angora yarn.  In her frustration, she would only succeed in tying the mess into even greater knots.  About that time I would hear her muttering under her breath, "Where's my scissors, I'm going to cut this mess apart and start over."  That's when I would volunteer to help her untangle the basket.

For some strange reason I loved untangling her balls of yarn.  I would rewind the worst of the wayward ones, put the embroidery floss back in its pocket, the knitting needles and crochet hooks in another pocket and organize her balls of yarn by color, so it looked pretty and was ready for her to create from once again.  In doing this task many times over the years, I discovered a key principle that has stayed with me throughout life.  

If I went after the most tangled balls in the mess, it only made things worse.  But if I would find the balls of yarn that were the least entangled and gently remove them from the rest, it became a doable task.  The first few balls could sometimes take a long time to untangle, but inevitably there would come what I came to think of as the magic turning point.  That was the place where things would suddenly get very loose, separate and the task would begin to progress very quickly.

Does your life feel like that basket of yarn?  It's a tangled mess and you want to change everything about it RIGHT NOW!  You don't know where to even begin to start untangling to get it reorganized.  Don't take on every out-of-control area of your life at once.  Pick one thing at a time.  Make the changes you need to in that one area.  Do it thoroughly and consistently.  Do it until the task is completed, you're able to maintain the change in your life and then pray about what you need to take on next. 

More importantly, pray before you even begin to try to make the changes.  If you're like me, you know you just don't have the power to change yourself anyway.  None of us can succeed if we try in our own strength.  For some of you praying is as natural as breathing, for others it's a something you've never really done before.  If you're in the later category, it's not something you have to do in a certain way, it's merely having a conversation with God.  James 1:5 says "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him."  He loves to answer these kinds of prayers!

Lord, my life feels like that basket of yarn.  I don't even know where to start or which one to untangle first.  I probably don't even realize how tangled up it all is, I just know it isn't working.  Please show me a little at a time what I can do to restore sanity and function to my daily life.  Show me the extra burdens I'm bearing that you haven't asked me to.  Show me the commitments I've made that are for good causes but aren't good for my family life and even my relationship with you.  Show me the tasks in my life that can be let go because they won't matter in twenty years and those that are important to daily life and can't be let go.

Then Lord, change the attitude of my heart about doing those that I simply must do, help me to do them cheerfully rather than with resentment.  Help me to see the tasks that really don't have any lasting value and find a way to eliminate them or simplify them so that they take less and less of my precious time with my family.

I don't even know where to begin… but you do, I turn over this crazy mess of a basket of yarn to you and thank you in advance for starting to clean it up and organize it so that I can once again find joy and effectiveness in the life you've given me to live,  Amen!

Audrey Jeanne Roberts