Chatting to a new acquaintance at a supper party over the
holidays, she asked me why I hadn’t pursued some of my writing ambitions. I
floundered. I prevaricated. I stammered out that there were so many
distractions, so much to do.
Lame.
This morning therefore I took a walk with the Lord, and
asked him to identify the blockages. I quickly understood that it isn’t so much
the physical distractions which I allow to eat up the time. It’s the mental
distractions. The concerns which I meditate on rather than meditating on God.
The anxieties for those I love which pop back into my head over and over again
until I am ruminating on them.
At least when a cow ruminates on her cud, it becomes
digestible and does her body some good. When I ruminate on worries, they expand
and I dig deeper ruts to ensnare my thoughts.
Each concern becomes a cul de sac which leads me back to
where I started from and accomplishes nothing.
God directed my thinking that if I will only take these
concerns to God once and leave them with him, trusting that he does have the
answer and is actually working in the situations, I can put up a Do Not Enter
sign at the opening to the cul de sac of thoughts and then obey that sign.
Hard to do. I found that as I continued my walk my thoughts
kept zeroing in on those old familiar cul de sacs, so I had to admit defeat – ‘I
can’t do it, Lord. I need your help. Please remind me every time I start to
head into a cul de sac that the Do Not Enter sign is still there and relevant.
Once I’ve asked you to do something, I can just skim over it
in prayer – hey, don’t forget about that situation, Lord, lying down that cul
de sac in X’s life.
Then eventually my brain will be freed up to think
creatively again, to focus on the writing ambitions I’ve still got.
I can head down a road less travelled rather than encircling
my familiar mental suburbs again and again. 2015, here I come!
