Hello to all who have decided to follow along as I post for 21 days straight as part of our church fast. As you can see, each entry is numbered as a particular day, so if you are reading this and the title above doesn’t say Day 1 (this one does), then you should stop now and go read from Day 1. Thanks for being brave enough to join me.
It’s that time of year again, when our church conducts a 21 day fast. Each congregant is asked to pick something or somethings to fast from, whether it is food items, habits, coffee/caffeine, or something else. I struggle each year to pick things, as I greatly dislike the two to three day “head is going to explode” feeling sans caffeine, and I don’t have a ton of bad habits to avoid.
I do have some bad habits, like not posting to this site on a regular basis, or writing at all on a regular basis, so I’m going to flip the script and fast from not doing something. I’m going to post something all twenty-one days of this fast, even if it is just “hi” and “bye”, but I will attempt to do better than that.
Today, I feel the need to express my first days of the year discombobulation, which I’ve had for several years now, but seem to be acute this year. Yes, 2019 was a turbulent year, with buying a house, attending my 25-year college reunion, experiencing my daughter’s wedding, being amazed at marking my 25th wedding anniversary (who knew there was someone out there who would put up with me for 25 years?), my youngest child turning 18, and everything in between those events.
So I find myself discombobulated. That’s an expensive word that just boils down to “confused”. I described it as not being able to put all the pieces into a Perfection game, timer or no timer. I’m having trouble with the fact that my annual “to-do” list (what I do in place of New Year’s resolutions) hasn’t changed much in three years, with “finish a book” still at the top of it. “Read more”, “exercise”, and “stay in touch with family” are also still on there, but I did add a twentieth item to my 2020 list – “chase the lion”.
“Chase the lion” comes from the title of a book by Mark Batterson, the full title being –
“Chase the lion. If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s too small.”
Mark Batterson is the author of Christian inspirational books, about a dozen of them, and while I have not yet read this book, I look forward to it (#3 on my 2020 to-do list – read more). I may read more of his stuff if I like this one, but just the title of this one is enough to warrant a place on my list.
While this book is focused on dreaming big in relation to doing God’s work and putting our trust in him, regardless of circumstances and resources, my personal lion for now is finishing a book. So the first item and the last item on my list are essentially the same thing – finish a book. We’ll have to see if I can do that in the next three hundred or so days.
Back to discombobulation. The pieces of my life are having difficulty going back into regular places, whether it is work, dealing with our still-new-to-us house, my participation in church activities like worship and life groups, my family (a wide-ranging and many-faceted topic), or other aspects of life that refuse to settle. I like regularity and dislike chaos, so this confusion and unsettling are…unsettling and confusing.
I hope that in the next few days I can get to a stasis point where my mind is reaching some kind of equilibrium. That would make moving into this new year and new decade a bit easier. I suspect some of my uneasiness relates to my rapid approach to the age of fifty, but I’ll deal with that thought in another post.
I also have to accept the fact that God may need me in a state of discombobulation so that I will learn something, or have something pruned from me that I need to discard. Unfortunately, only time will tell, and I’m pretty impatient, too. I guess I’ll have to deal with that in later post, also.
Photo credit – Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash