Today was a great day for my youngest son. At thirteen, he has finally joined his dad and two older brothers in the production world at our church. It was his first day on a camera, on a roaming stage camera, during a Sunday service. He was so excited. So excited, in fact, that he got up early yesterday morning and got ready for church.

His dad got up early, too, to run a few errands, and took Evan along for the ride. My husband wondered why Evan was dressed in a collared shirt on a Saturday, but hey, teens can be weird about their clothes. This, we have learned after having three kids pass through this stage already. But when his dad pulled through the drive-thru at Bojangles, Evan asked him if they had time to do that before they needed to be at the church for rehearsal. He didn’t want to be late for his first Sunday on camera.

Only it was Saturday. Yep. We are still laughing about that one.

So today, Sunday, I decided to sit in and watch my youngest kid up there on stage. For his first Sunday, the production folks had Evan on camera in our overflow room. It’s no consolation prize. Our overflow room, with about 900 seats, holds more people than most church sanctuaries.

Evan was assigned to video the drummer. He grabbed shot after shot of the drummer doing his thing during worship. And there I was, snapping picture after picture of Evan, fully aware that the drummer was likely wondering who was this middle aged woman taking pictures of him. Sorry, dude. It’s the kid.

After taking an embarrassingly huge number of pictures of my kid, I decided to find a seat and begin actually worshipping God. I sat up close to the front, on the second row. After a few minutes, a family of three sat on the front row in front of me. A few more minutes into the service, I noticed the woman’s sweater. I might be easily distracted by fashion. What I noticed though, this time, was that she had her sweater on inside out.

This amused me more than it likely should have. Not because I was pointing a finger and laughing, but because that could be me. I secretly have a fear of looking down at my feet one day to find I have worn my house shoes to work or to church.

How often do we try to present ourselves as if we have it all together? Admittedly, some people do have it more together than others, but we all have days when we figuratively have our sweaters on inside out.

Sometimes that’s simply because we over commit. We like to pretend we are super women, when in reality we are just regular women with jam-packed schedules we never should have committed to.

Women are known for being able to juggle multiple things in our lives at once. But everyone has a limit to the number of balls they can effectively keep in the air at one time. Add one too many and everything falls to the ground.

One of my friends asked me if I told the lady about her sweater. Normally, I would have said something, but I figured if I did, then she would sit there for the rest of the service and think about her sweater rather than what our pastor was trying to say to us. And it was good stuff. I didn’t want her to miss it. Anyone wearing her clothing inside out needed to hear what he was saying.

If we aren’t careful, we can run through this life, willy nilly, without serving out our purpose. People, like churches and businesses, need to define who and what we are.  That means we must live an intentional life. We have to manage our schedules, or they will manage us. They will define us if we let them, and they will have us doing things like wearing our house shoes out in public.

As I sat behind this lady at church, I decided we would probably be good friends, she and I. She with her sweater and me with my house shoes. We need to reign in all that we are trying to do, and whittle it down to an amount we can realistically accomplish. We need to stop holding so tightly to this life. As my pastor said this morning, “We need to wear this life like a loose garment. We are just passing through.”