Sometimes making life "easier" makes it harder

Have you ever set out to do something in an effort to "make life easier" only to find that what you really did was make life harder?

Sigh.

Welcome to my week.

I had this brilliant idea of re-running some old posts to free up a little time this week. Sounds good, doesn't it? And I do like those old posts and am excited to share them again.

But it did not make life easier. In fact, I spent Monday and Tuesday and this morning trying to clean up my mess. As a fairly inexperienced blogger, I really hadn't thought through the best way to re-post the old posts. I just changed the "posted date" with the idea it would post them separately on those days and leave the original in tact. Or at the very least just schedule them to run on those particular days.

That was not a good idea. It didn't actually re-post them, it just moved them to a different location in the blog all clumped up together with the new dates. So now they are out of order and not only had they not actually re-posted, just been moved, I had no idea when they had originally run. So I came up with the wonderful idea of just copying and pasting and then deleting the old post.

Except now I can't see the number of hits on the original anymore and one of them I accidentally deleted COMPLETELY. As in, it is gone forever. And not only that, ALL the dozens of other posts I had linked back to the original posts now had bad broken links! ARGH! I had to systematically go through all 358 posts to make sure the links were updated to the correct new ones. My goodness, was that ever tedious.

So I now know the proper thing to do is leave the original post in tact in its original location and on the original date. Copy and paste it and its photos and links into a new post and post that. Then everything is beautiful.

I spent a great deal of time the last two days very frustrated with myself for doing this. I thought, good job there, Steph-O, tried to save yourself some time and what did ya do, huh? You made MORE work for yourself! Double ARGH! Talk about Backfire City!

But by today I have changed my way of thinking. It is a blessing in disguise. I learned something about how to do this in the future. It forced me to re-evaluate my life and how I can actually make changes in other ways to simplify things. April is very busy, so I need to give myself lots of slack, time to breathe and let go anything that is not essential. It has humbled me, as I need in life periodically. And it gave me fodder for another blog post! Yay!

But more than that, I think God wants me to slow down and focus on Him more and let Him guide my path in all things.While I had many reasons for starting - and continuing - this blog, it is all for Him. I feel called to do this and I now give it to God to steer as He sees fit to whatever end that entails. I just hope I am open to His way and don't get stuck in what I think I want.

And lastly, I found a few messy early posts and was able to tidy them up. Going through them all also helped me see once again what I am doing here, what this blog is about, what my purpose is. And I recall now, no matter what I do, it is all in God's hands and He will make it okay in the end.

Here's a quote I heard recently that I just love:  

"If you know that God's hand is in everything, then it is easy to leave everything in His hands."

(Moments after finishing this but before posting it, I just happened to see that someone whose interpretation of God's word was very influential to me during a rough time in life "shared" a different blog post of mine on Facebook. That was very gratifying and perhaps, in its own way, a "sign" I'm on the right track. I sure hope so.)