Unglued

*Comments are now closed. I'm taking my kid on one last summer adventure today and if I'm not entirely wiped out tonight, I will determine and announce the winners then. I've loved reading your stories. You guys are great!

We put a pool in our backyard earlier this summer. My kids and I love nothing more than swimming together and it has been great for family bonding. Our golden retriever, Beckham, is so happy we're in the backyard with him, he doesn't know what to do. I love seeing him jump in like he's a rescue dog, but unfortunately the water makes him greek, as Jackson says. (Reek, if you were wondering.)

There's a strange phenomenon that happens to Annabeth every time we get in the pool. Within 5 minutes she has to go. I wish I were talking about the kind of go you can deal with by having your kid  find a grassy patch around the corner of the house (don't hate), but noooooo. It's the kind you have to dry off and go inside for. Since you painstakingly waited 15 minutes for your carefully applied scunscreen to soak into your skin, you just blot yourself and your kid with a towel and then the floor gets soaked. Fun times. 

It happens like clockwork. I've done everything in my power to try to persuade my daughter to go before getting in the pool, but no. I don't want to! I don't need to! I can't! I don't like it! I feel certain that I will see a flock of feathered pigs soaring over the backyard on the day she finally cooperates.  Early in the summer I made the risky move of telling Annabeth that since she refused go before, I would spank her if she made us have to get out because she needed to go. Five minutes later I could tell she needed to, but she was fighting it because she didn't want a spanking. Ugh! Trying to control a preschooler's bodily functions is simply maddening! I had to take back my threat so that we didn't have a problem in the pool. 

This scenario made me come unhinged a few of times, but Annabeth pulled the stunt so frequently that I had to learn how to deal with my frustration in a wise way. 

It's oh-so-fitting that our pool was the setting in which I devoured Lysa TerKeurst's new book, Unglued. I was tested many, many times while reading about our human tendency to come emotionally unglued. At one point I couldn't find my book and Annabeth told me she had thrown it down under the lounge chair. It was resting in a small puddle of water. Jackson was playing with a water gun, and that's probably all I need to say because you can guess how that went down. 

Coming unglued is something I have struggled with for a long time. Lysa says raw emotions can make you come unglued in two extremes - by exploding or by stuffing. I can easily recognize that I do both of those things. I tend to explode in my home or with my family and I tend to stuff in public or with those I'm not related to. I've been through three bouts of Christian counseling in my adult life and two of them were because of this issue. The first time was for exploding and the last time was for stuffing. 

So Unglued pretty much made me feel like Lysa had been reading my mail. But she is such a woman of grace (and humor) that I didn't mind too much. I could relate to just about every story she told on herself. And oh, if I had the time to share all of mine! Help me, Lord! 

I sent Lysa a text message the other day saying, "I'm loving Unglued!" Except I typed it wrong and it read, "I'm living Unglued!" Eek! With Christ's help, not anymore. Thank You, Lord, for giving this message to the Church so that we can learn not to live unglued.

As a participant of the blog tour for Unglued, Zondervan gave me a free copy of the book for myself and two to give away to my blog readers. Yay! If you'd like to win one of the books, just leave me a comment and make sure I'll be able to contact you. If you want to share an unglued story, I'd love it.