Supernatural Grace - it's real!!!

Wow, so Happy New Year everyone!
I brought in the new year at home doing a puzzle by myself drinking white tea with so much honey in it, it was more like a dessert. Sigh.
It may sound drab, but after having my house stuffed full of house guests for four days, having a night to myself in a quiet house was like the best kind of treat.
But onto my main topic for today, supernatural grace! It is real, and my life was just a living example of it for a little over four days.
The Tuesday after Christmas was the day OneThing started in Kansas City! For those who don't know, OneThing is a young adult conference that is put on by the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and almost everyone who has ever been or thought to be at IHOP comes out for OneThing. It is the biggest event the House of Prayer puts on every year at no cost to the people who attend. It's amazing!
So a lot of people come, and a lot of the peopel who come are not able to afford the hotel prices down by the convention center, so almost every IHOP family I know hosts people in their house; friends, family, and even strangers.
This year was our first year to do so, and I was so excited. The day before I made my house as spotless as I could manage with two babies, and then the crowds came. We had three guys sleeping in our living room, a guy sleeping downstairs with one of our room mates, our two room mates, and a girl who shared my bedroom with me, while Ken slept on the floor in the living room. It was a full house, but so much fun.
The night everyone arrived I did not get to sleep until after midnight because some of our guests did not arrive until late, but even after that, I still could not sleep. I was so excited for all the great fellowship I knew I would have that it was like waiting for Christmas morning.
So bright and early I got up and made myself a cup of coffee, and then everyone else woke up when my babies came into the kitchen for their breakfast, go figure. Everyone ended up in the kitchen. Ken was rocking the French Press and people were cooking eggs and making oatmeal. I was tending babies in the midst of it, and the whole scene worked so harmoniously I was shocked.
I am not a morning person in general, and I don't handle stress very well at all, so the fact that I was so calm and even enjoying this early morning scene was supernatual to me. I could feel the Lord's peace all over me as I manuevered around people and helped to clean up the beds from the living room. It was like when you have a dream, and you know you're playing the part of someone else, but it feels natural at the same time to be 'them'.
I knew I should have been on the edge of freak out mode, but I was calm, collected, gracious, kind, and patient above all things. It was wildly cool.
Even now I'm looking back at those four days of visitors in my house and I know it was not me in those moments. I would have been sharp with my words, yelling at my kids, grumbling to my husband, and/or running away completely and letting my house fall apart.
In the Lord's goodness to me, I was in the mix the whole time, I made sure the house was clean after everyone would leave for the day, I tried to make extra food, and I kept my children out of our guests bags. The girls napped on time, and they only watched a few movies. I'm telling you, it was supernatural!!!
There were several times throughout the whole thing where I kept thinking, when is this great feeling of ease going to lift and leave me in freak out mode, but it never left until after the guests were all gone and my house was clean again.
Then it was a noticable shift. It was suddenly harder than before to say yes graciously to my children and super hard to be motivated to do anything domestic. I was tired and I wanted sugar more than anything else. I slept a lot that day, and then I spent the next day asking the Lord why I couldn't be that 'other' person all the time?
I felt like He said I could, though, and so I asked Him how, and I don't know that He has really answered me, but when I have found myself in situations that could be stressful, I think to myself something like this:
'What would that other 'me' have done in this situation?" and then I try to do it that way. It works out some times, but other times I still find myself on the edge of freak out mode.
So who was that other 'me' you may ask? It was Jesus living through me at a greater level I'm convinced, and it was such a beautiful thing for me to experience. It wasn't all rosy and unreal, it was real life with two babies and a bunch of house guests and I had a supernatural Grace flowing through me. Sigh.
Oh well, I've had a taste now of what supernatural Grace is like, and I'm addicted. I was a better mother, wife and friend those couple of days, in general that is, and I would like to operate in that mode more often.
One of my reasons for writing it in a blog is so that this miracle is recorded somewhere to remind myself that it really did happen this way, so I can believe for other Grace miracles in the future.
Be blessed!