Hats, Hats and More Hats!

This month, the WELCA ladies at one of my churches hosted a breakfast and the theme was "Hats off to Prayer."  It was a fun morning filled with old hats and many stories of mothers and grandmothers along with some nice thoughts about prayer and, as always, plenty of good food.


And between this little get together and the fact that it's derby time, I have been thinking a lot about hats lately, and more specifically the hats that I wear on a regular basis.

So, let's start with the most easily recognizable ones:

1. I am a mom.  This is a hat that I love!  I love being a mom and a wife and everything that comes with it.

 2. I am a Pastor.  This is one of my callings in the world.  I love being able to lead worship and be with people in this beautiful and broken world.

 3. I am a fairly creative person.  I am happiest and more pleasant to be around when I am feeding my creativity and digging into a new project.

 4. I love animals and I especially love any chance I get to spend with my two horses.

 These are just four of the hats that I wear.  To them you could also easily add a chef's hat, a wife hat, an "athlete" hat (and don't worry, I use that phrase very loosely), a friend hat, a daughter hat, a sister hat and the list goes on and on.

I love wearing each and every one of these hats.  As a matter of fact, I usually try my hardest to not do anything that I dislike too terribly much, which is why my house is not all that clean.  But the trouble comes when I try to balance too many hats at once.  Yes, there are often times where I balance 2 or 3 hats at once with little or no problem.  For example: yesterday while driving home, I got a phone call from the funeral home and while on the phone with our amazing funeral director my daughter sat in the back seat screaming at the top of her lungs "NO TALKING MOMMY!!!!!!".  She was tired, as was I and we both needed some quiet time to decompress after long and tiring days.  It happens to all of us, the need to juggle hats from time to time.

But lately I have realized that I can only juggle so many hats for so long before I begin dropping them.  Lately I have felt burnt out, exhausted, inefficient, and not enough.  And this has led me, from time to time to put on this hat...

...the crazy person hat.  And for those of you who have experienced that, I am sorry, but it happens.

And as I sat in that quiet car, post conversation with the funeral director, letting both my daughter and myself decompress, I began to see this theme of "Hats off to prayer" in a different way.  I began to realize that it doesn't matter how many hats you have to juggle.  What matters is that from time to time you must take your hats off and put on the only one that truly matters.  The one that reminds you that you are a beloved child of God, the one that allows you to let go of all the other stuff and simply spend time with your creator, that lets go of the judgment and the anxiety of not being enough, of occasionally dropping a hat and tells you that you are perfect in your imperfection and loved deeply.

Now, I'm not gonna say that this realization has drastically changed my life in 24 hours but it did change the rest of that car ride home.  For at least those thirty minutes I could simply be present in the moment, let go of the hats that I wasn't wearing at the time but worrying over anyway and settle into a quiet moment with God.

Then I pulled into the driveway and started putting my hats back on.  My mom hat, my chef hat as I got dinner on the table, my pastor hat as I dealt with more phone calls regarding funeral arrangements and 100 other things.  The hats never come off fully but I am trying to remember that I also carry on my head the hat of child of God that bids me, from time to time, to take the others off and remember to be still and know our God.