Dimeji came home so worn out from keeping up with her kids, he actually asked to go to bed! Then on my way out Katie suggested we set a schedule so he can come over a few times a week, regularly. And yes, for free!
What made me really give in today and call her was remembering what had just happened a few weeks ago...
I co-hosted a birthday party with one of my sisters in Christ whose birthday is a few days before mine. Since it was joint party, we were making decisions together on things like, what kind of cake, whether to get balloons, etc. When we went to pick out the cake, it was a nightmare! She wanted the equivalent of a wedding cake and I wanted something simple. We made no decisions on that visit, but afterwards I had decided to back down and just let her get what she wanted since she seemed to care so much about it...
Then at church on Sunday, another sister walked over to us and said she was not going to be able to make it to the party, but she wanted to come over to my house and make cup cakes for the event. Immediately I was thinking, "Yes! This is great! This is an answer to my prayers." My fellow birthday pal, was very hesitant. She was so stuck on her wedding/birthday cake that the thought of anything other than what she had envisioned was not going to suffice.
She eventually gave in to the cup cakes, but she was not all that happy about it. A day later when we talked about it, I told her I thought she was being ungrateful for the act of kindness being shown to us. I told her how much of a blessing this was; not only were we getting what we wanted, which was cake for the party, but now it was going to be free (and mind you, I was the one footing the bill for the cake, and unbeknownst to her, my funds have been more tight than those jeans I was struggling to button in the NatSun challenge video!) and it was a gift from her to us. She wanted to do it for us. It would be so rude to say, "No thank you, your gift is not exactly what we wanted so don't bother!"
I thought about that incident today and it was like the whole cake incident happened to prepare me for this moment with Katie.
I do not like to ask for help. I am getting better at it, but for some reason I feel like I need to pay for or suffer through everything. Someone offering me help, when their help is something that normally would be paid for, makes me feel like I should just pay the person and not let them do it for free.
But I didn't feel that way about the cup cakes. When Nina offered to make them I was truly excited about it. Not paying for the wedding cake was a great relief and I love her cup cakes anyway! Not to mention it was good way for me to get to know her better since she was coming to my house to make them. Maybe since she offered it as a gift, I was able to accept it. I don't know.
When I compared to the two incidents, I told myself, "Okay Sunshine, now you are acting like wedding cake Bree*, Katie has offered to baby sit and truth be told, affording hourly care would be a tight stretch. A stretch you could benefit from not attempting to make at all. Why can't you just accept this as a gift? You can get to know Katie better in the process and it would be a good thing for you."
So when I thought about it like that, I accepted Katie's offer as a gift from God. I did something that does not come naturally to me, I accepted her help and I did not make a promise to do something for her to earn her kindness towards me. I can really learn from this. I often find myself in situations where people are willing to do really nice things for me, and I always mess it up by trying to pay them for it. It is something that I have been trying to grow through. I guess I am making progress!
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