These are my lovely kitchen cabinets and this particular one is the pots and pans cabinet.  I love the dark finish and I love to open the doors and see all the pots and pans stacked in size order.  Frying pans on one side and stock pots and sauce pans nicely tucked inside one another.

In life things may not always be what they seem or what we want.  Yep- here is the real life, inside view of my pots and pans cabinet.

This drives me absolutely INSANE!  At one time the pots and pans were all nestled nicely like a perfect  cabinet and I didn’t even notice.  Now I have help emptying the dishwasher and have given lesson after lesson on how to complete a preschool task of stacking smallest to biggest size order and unfortunately I have come to accept it is an unteachable lesson at my house.

I have gained a new perspective and am intentionally choosing to find the “meaningfuller” joy in an untamed pots and pan cabinet.  I am choosing to open a door and brace for a possible escaping pan.  I am choosing to be thankful the to teach my children a lesson in responsibility of household chores.  I am choosing to be thankful the dishwasher got emptied .

I have also learned to let the messy cabinet go and focus my time and energy on relationships.  It is now a family joke and provides conversation every time someone opens the door.  I won’t lie, it still drives me a bit crazy at times but in the grand scheme of things it is a wooden box with the contents a bit out of size order and the pots and pans still cook our food the same.  I have had to change my focus and see what I can learn from a messy cabinet.    For me it has been a lesson of what is behind closed doors is not always what it seems.  Life is hard and messy and many people are messy, in tangles and confused on the inside.  We  often don’t know what is happening behind closed doors of people’s homes or behind the smile on a face or behind the kitchen cabinet.  My hope is that we can find peace with the imperfections of life and find meaningfuller joys in the things that matter.