Just recently, my laptop had some soda spilled into the port end, and I had to pull it apart and let all the components dry for a week to see if it would work again. (It did, thankfully.) During that week, I was unable to waste time web-browsing, hulu-watching, facebook-checking, and article-writing. None of those things are bad per-se, but in their stead I ended up reading three and a half books, which probably doubles my total for the year.
What’s more, I re-discovered that reading books leads me into a better and deeper place with God. It’s not that I don’t spend time online reading Christian meditations and insights, but I fear that I read under the pressure of getting to next thing. I perhaps skim a bit more, and, too often don’t give myself the time to absorb and reflect. In the midst of a book, I find it easy to stop and to pray, to consider my life, and to give my full attention (or as much of it as I have with a two-year-old in the house).
I have also been going through a move, which is causing me to consider all of the things I own and what I really need. I am looking at this new space and considering how to arrange my life within it. And it is within the context of these two big changes that I have made a new spirit-change goal for the fall that is among the most challenging (but most spot-on and deep-seated) that I’ve tried in years. I think I’ve been given a clarity of vision about myself that I sometimes lose when I’m running more on auto-pilot.
Oddly enough, one of the books I’ve been reading, “A Perfect Mess” by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, makes a similar point about how making changes in one area requires a bit of a shakeup in life overall, to un-stick you. I thought it worth sharing with Christlikeness-seekers:
“The most common cause of stress at organizations, [Ben] Fletcher explains, is mistreatment at the hands of managers, who often tend to be overly assertive, rigid, and intolerant. In working with managers to help them improve their behavior, he found that while managers could usually understand and accept the fact that they had been acting inappropriately, they were rarely able to make and maintain long-term changes in their behavior with subordinates. People are simply too conditioned to acting the same way every day, he says, which often makes being locked into harmful habits. Focus and consistency, in other words, became barriers to solving problems. So Fletcher asked the managers to alter other, easier-to-change behaviors in their lives, like the route they took to work or what they ate for lunch or where they sat at meetings — anything at all, as long as it introduced some variation in behavior. The results were surprising: over the course of as little as a few weeks, managers who threw monkey wrenches into their routines in this way found that they were also able to change the way they treated subordinates. The reason, says Fletcher, is that peple tend to get trapped in what he calls “habit webs.” When they try to effect an important, useful change, they find they’re stuck tight. But if they snip away at individual, thin, supporting strands of the web, the web can eventually be loosened enough to permit more important change. ‘New behaviors lead to new experiences, and eventually that helps people change the way they think,’ he says.”
We only have on record about three years of what Jesus’ life was like, but it’s pretty clear from the gospels that Jesus didn’t have a schedule. He didn’t have office hours. He didn’t have touring dates. He was led by the spirit from one place to the next, often arriving late (according to when people wanted him there), and always being open to whoever crossed his path and making time for them. Jesus didn’t give himself the opportunity to get hooked into a routine that he would later have to fight against to make his spirit free.
Of course, the world is a different place today, and punctuality and scheduling of events have become more a part of society now that we all have clocks. Going fully anarchist in scheduling might not be possible. But if Jesus didn’t need things neat, ordered, and settled, and he was open to new experiences and new challenges and disruptions, then perhaps it is a good idea to view such “difficulties” in life as important elements in trying to live more in God’s spirit.
