Three Things Thursday [Vol.6]

This week I would like to share 3 awkward moments I have experienced on the TTC:

1. Wondering if the person across from you is INSANE or just speaking a foreign language with a covert bluetooth. Especially when they are staring you in the face and speaking so intensely!
   
   
2. Hoping you fit in the empty seat between two big people and failing to actually hit the seat. THEN needing to squeeze loose and find another seat. Sigh. Fortunately, this just happened for the first time last week; usually I'm a pretty good judge of hip-width.
   
   
3. People who fight/break up over the phone on the bus. I remember one time an entire bus fell silent as a guy broke down into tears and yelled at his girlfriend for cheating on him even more than she had already admitted. Less embarrassing but still ridiculous was a woman who was fighting with her boyfriend and kept hanging up on him only to immediately call back and continue the fight.
   

Time Change

Daylight savings is curb stomping my brain
I ride through my days on a headache that morphs from my skull to my eyes to my scalp down my neck.
My stomach churns like I haven't slept, wants to eat my emotions like razor blades and popcorn.
9pm comes like a train screeching into the station, and the carpet calls me, rough and sturdy, to rest my face on it. It's closer than my bed, after all.
5am bluffs me awake, then smirks a red gleam through the dark: too early to get up, less than an hour left to sleep, dawn will come after that. Sucker.
But the early air smells like Spring, and the soft ground presses gently on my feet to promise grass will grow soon.
The night sky stretches over my mornings again, but the wind doesn't scrape like it used to.
Finally daylight slips over the horizon, reflected by office windows 20 floors up, bought at a price of bleary eyes and that hovering, dull ache. No refunds, just hope that Spring stays.
And I can always sleep on the train.

Wax On, Wax Off

I was praying about prayer earlier this week. I want to pray, and I love to pray, but days keep going by with just a few God-ward thoughts and maybe a "hey God, help me not to suck today please. I'd like to be kind, and um, to have a good day. Thanks."

Prayer is a helluva lot more than that, and I have been frustrated by how my soul pretends it is satisfied. Not that on-the-go prayers don't have a place, but I am in a season of early afternoons off work with very little responsibility, and I am not satisfied for all of those hours to be spent walking the dog and washing dishes. So I had a chat with God about it at small group on Monday, about why I don't just do what I want to want! And I realized that I don't know how to just be with God, so I avoid it for fear of feeling like a failure, or I over complicate it. It is SO EASY for me to fall into the trap of choosing a strategy: picking a posture, setting a time, keeping silence to listen, and all of those things are good and helpful, but they are not what bring me to God. When I spend time with my friends, generally we plan a time and place to get together, and we may have an idea of what we want to do, but once we connect, we go with the flow! If I change seats because the sun is in my eyes, nobody thinks we need to start over; if I get distracted I apologize, but I don't think we should just give up talking.

On Monday, God reminded me how music settles me and opens my spirit, and he suggested I could start my time with him by singing. "And," he mentioned while I gazed at the prayer candle we had lit for small group, "the candle is a nice focal point." So true - and so much less risky when I'm tired than closing my eyes to pray.
So Tuesday I lit our prayer candle, and I did some singing. Then I tried to pray but was too scattered, so I sang some more. And then I tried again. And I realized that I wasn't so much distracted as overwhelmed: where to start? So I said to God, "There is too much for me to even say, and you know it all anyways. I know you want me to pray, but it's too much, so I can't."

And God said, "That candle is filled with so much wax, which is way too much for that tiny flame, but over time it will all get burned up. Let my Spirit soften your burdens and draw them away into myself. It just takes time."

And I thought that was very beautiful.

Monday night I wrote that I was struggling with prayer because I didn't know what to expect. If I didn't have some breakthrough or emotional confirmation of encountering God, then I felt like it was wasted time. I know that's not necessarily true, but it very often feels that way. Remembering that candle helps me get my head around having criteria and expectations and psyching myself out about prayer before I even begin. Indistinguishable amounts of progress are okay; feeling hard and waxy and stuck is okay; feeling like a drippy mess is okay too; the most important thing is to draw near to the flame of God's Spirit and let Him work on me.

*Linked to 31Days2Happy through elizabethesther.com