Ever since my amazing journey at the monastery (you can read about it here, here, and here), life looks very much like it did before. I still teach and practice piano. While school is out, I'm working on projects and slowly organizing the house we moved into last year. I still spend more time than I like each week organizing all the pills I take for lupus (up to 16 a day). I still lug around a ginormous bag filled with too many books everywhere I go and watch TV with my husband in the evenings.
Same old, same old. But not quite. My days are nuanced in ways they weren't before. And one small change in particular went a long way.
The day I returned from the monastery, I traded my iPhone for an alarm clock. Well, not entirely. I still have an iPhone. But instead of using my phone as my wake-up alarm, I use a tiny alarm clock to wake myself up in the mornings. It cost $5 and is so small it doesn't even have a radio. And where is my phone? Charging in the living room. It's not allowed in my bedroom at night. This one small change led to thousands more. My phone (e-mail, text messages, FaceBook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram...) is no longer the first thing I see when I wake up and the last thing I see before I sleep. On my night stand, I have a Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, and a devotional. In the mornings, when I feel lupus the strongest and my body is too stiff to get up, these are the things I grab first. Though my first thoughts range from "Where's my iPhone?" to "I need to brush my teeth," and to "My body hurts and I have too much to do today,"...my first action is to surrender all of these things to God and pursue what matters most. Each morning, my mind races in a million different directions. And each morning, I will my mind to turn to God.
It hasn't been easy. I am breaking habits that are deeply imbedded into my being and starting new habits that the enemy of my soul doesn't want me to have. At first, everything else on my mind felt so urgent and loud (almost yelling). The high-pitched beep beep beep of the alarm clock made me and my husband grumpy. It felt awkward turning to God when my mind was so hazy and I hadn't brushed my teeth yet. But I chose to stubbornly pursue what matters most. Each morning, all the "other stuff" in my mind yells a little softer than it did the day before. My husband and I are getting used to the morning beeps. And I've come to accept that God loves me so much that He will take me just as I am--morning breath and all.
I don't feel like I'm moving mountains in my new morning routine. (Maybe I am and I just don't know it yet.) I haven't had any moments that were full of intense emotion and prophetic words from God. But I'm less frantic now. My day is filled with a calm I didn't have before. Things that would have caused me anxiety don't have that power over me anymore. I loved my work before, but now I enjoy it even more and have a stronger sense of purpose when I do it. My husband and I argue less and talk more about meaningful things. (And now that I just typed this, we're probably going to have an argument about something ridiculous tonight. Just kidding. I hope I'm just kidding.) I feel safer letting God search the little crevices of my heart and fill me with dreams so big they scare me. And instead of feeling shame because I'm not where I thought I would be by this time in my life, I see the significance of what I'm accomplishing now and feel like I'm on the verge of something wonderful.
So this is my life. One small, five-dollar change. I have all summer to make it stick before I go back to working three jobs in the fall. And who knows what kind of stories are waiting for me ahead...
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