Follow-through is not one of my strong suits. Ask my wife. My bed side table contains a stack of books that are only two-thirds finished before I pick up another book to continue the cycle. Our nearly twelve years of marriage is littered with slow-moving home improvement projects that stall out, eventually finished only after much pushing and prodding (or with the assistance of a professional). And don't forget the failed diet plans, fitness plans and plans to ride my bike more and drive the car less.
This is a problem I am confronting right now with Lent and it has led to a bit of a dry patch for me. Truthfully, I have never had a Lent where I have stuck through with my discipline for the entire forty days. It's the same reason I have so many unfinished books, a bathroom remodel disaster to my credit and ideas for better health down the drain . . . it's just not in my nature. I feel very much like the seed thrown on the rocky soil in the Parable of the Sower (Mk 4:1-20). To start with I am full of ambition, great ideas and genuine excitement. But then life happens, I lose focus and forget what it was that drove me to begin whatever venture is the crash and burn du jour.
Right now I am feeling a great frustration with this Lenten Ramadan. The last few days I feel like I have just been going through the motions. I'm not yet to the point where I'm counting down days and I really don't feel like I'm doing this because I have something to prove. I just feel like I'm missing something. I feel inattentive, distracted and exhausted. I feel like each time I come here to write I am empty. I feel like God is right there in front of me but for one reason or another I am missing God. I feel like great insights I received this past Tuesday were ten years ago.
I almost just wrote that "I hope something big happens this week to give me my focus back," but I know that's the wrong approach and ego-driven. What I do hope for this week is that whatever needs to happen happens. Who knows, that could mean more dry patches, an epiphany of great magnitude or something entirely different. Whatever it is, I pray for the grace to be attentive and available to God this week and, unlike so many things in my life, to see this through to its completion. Perhaps the rains will come.
We human beings are impatient. We can become more impatient when we arbitrarily decide this is how we are supposed to "be"/feel and don't.
ReplyDeleteLet your expectations/ambitions go---let the spirituality happen in its own good time instead of frantically running after it.
The Quran says God is as close to us as our jugular vein---sometimes we end up searching for God in all the wrong places.......
Thanks for the advice. I know deep down that this is the case and there is nothing I can do to make God work on my time schedule or in response to my perceived needs. But, you are right, our humanity often gets in the way.
ReplyDeleteThis Lent has been filled with many beautiful lessons of patience, humility and gratitude for me and I have certainly experienced God's closeness with an acuteness that I have rarely known before.