So this is what...

...procrastination looks like.

This upcoming Saturday I am teaching at a stake Relief Society conference for my church. It is a gathering of a few hundred women, put together to celebrate the amazing capacities and joy that are inherent in our lovely gender.

I was asked to teach a month or two ago and have been alternately excited and terrified ever since. Today is a terrified day. (Terror has an exhilerating quality, but it has also required the consumption of two bowls of mint ice cream...so, there is that.)

Over the past month I have collected talks, insightful quotes and empowering bits of scripture. The plan was to sit at my big tanker desk, stacks of collected inspiration on hand, and create the lesson over the course of a couple weeks. Good, organized plan.

Today is Thursday. The lesson is in two days. I am surrounded by my stacks of paper, which so far have not proved inspiring, and the lesson is still...shall we say...unformed.

There is solace in the fact that the house is as spotless as it has ever been. When faced with lesson planning over the past few days, I decided to spring clean. Couches were moved, floors were scrubbed, I may have even cleaned the inside of my windows. Unprecedented.

I know what I want the women in my class to feel at the end of the lesson. Empowerment, freedom, the beauty of a life lived deliberately. That in this existence there is no room for fear or guilt. That happiness and wonder can be daily gifts and not one woman is too unworthy to receive them. That perfection is a goal of completion and not one of no errors. All the same things I try to remind myself of every day.

Good, lovely things. Perhaps I can capture them all and make them into a 50 minute lesson.

Time to try.

(Unless of course, you would like me to come and clean your house, or watch your kids, sort your spices, etc.)