Swimming.

I feel like I have been for the last week or so...lots of stuff goes into a comment like that, but the thing I cannont escape is that I have lacked any sort of focus for more than a few minutes. To read, pray, journal, prepare...feels like I'm a little dog who is tempted to chase everything that moves and forget the stuff right in front of me that needs to be done! Hence the lack of any sort of meaningful thoughts in this place...So today I will commit to writing SOMETHING daily and see how it goes!

I'm working through a book by a guy named Henri Nouwen called "Making All Things New -- An Invitation to Living the Spiritual Life"...right up my alley. I really feel connected to ministry and books that find the spaces where theology, scripture, and living as humans connect. Nouwen is a pretty reflective writer, and thus far I'm enjoying my mornings with him. A chapter last week spoke about being busy, and how we wear busy-ness as a badge of honor. The more we do, the more we are invovled in, the more value we believe is attached to ourselves and meaning to our lives. I admit I buy into this sometimes -- my first response to "how are you?" is usually something along the lines of "things are crazy but good", and then I detail the many balls we are trying to keep in the air. This value of busy is reflected in so many things -- how I eat, how I drink coffee, how I flip channels on the radio...more is better, faster is better, busy is better. But at what cost? We were gifted with a Saturday free last weekend -- no soccer, no youth trip due to weather up north, no dance pictures, and we hardly knew what to do with ourselves! I did nothing -- no studying, no message prep, nothing, and it felt really really odd! Have I bought into "doing" so much that a day around the house with nothing to do felt foreign?

Maybe it is time to dig in the heels and enjoy spring, enjoy time, and not try to add one more thing in hopes of finding fulfillment there...maybe it is time to start finding fulfillment in eternal rather than instant...