The Rut

Have you ever felt like you were in a rut? You probably have. I feel that way from time to time, stuck in a mental rut, cycling through the same thoughts, feelings and emotions. Running them in my mind, picturing them, chewing on them. I think about the poem in my head that I wrote about yesterday, about it recessing back into my mind. Maybe it was sucked into the vortex of the spin cycle of the mental rut I am describing here. I guess that is possible.

And the frustrating thing is that while my mind is in this seemingly endless spin cycle; it also seems to be trying to figure out how to break free. I know there are new ideas that need to come out; breakthroughs in thought. (At least they are breakthroughs for me. You may hear them and say, that's it?)

I guess that is what keeps my mind from giving in to the vortex and giving up. New thoughts, new directions, progress. I want to believe, I have to believe that the greatest progress comes out of the spinning churn of recycled thoughts, because it takes that little extra mental push to hatch the new ideas and have them establish their own path of flight.

So I can be encouraged. I can treat the spin cycle as a rut, or choose to think of it as the crucible in which new ideas will be born and set free. I can think of the spin cycle as a trap, a mental gravity trap of some sort; or I can treat it as the launching point of the next series of steps I take in a new direction of progress.

I think this is where my faith comes in. I cannot be stuck in a rut with Christ by my side, for He is moving me ever forward towards Him. The times I feel in a rut is probably due to loss of focus on Him. If I take my eyes off of Him, I lose my balance and enter the spin cycle.

That being said, I need wait for His timing. I can open my eyes to the world and see it spinning around and around. Or I can close my eyes in prayer and see Him.

There is no rut if I choose correctly. That is my hope each day.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, God, thoughts, ideas

Recession

To put your minds at ease, this is not a post about the economy. I am talking about the recession of thoughts back into the deep recesses of my mind. (Where else would things recess into but recesses?)

I am speaking of a poem that was lingering about in my mind just not ready to come out, no, just not yet. I had mentioned not long ago that I felt it coming on.

And now it is gone. Into hiding. It lays buried deep in my mind if it exists at all anymore. If it ever existed in the first place.

For those of you who would think it strange that I would even write something I would try to pass off as a poem. I have done it before. Here. Here. And here. Not to mention here and here. I think there is one other somewhere else, I just cannot find it right now. Wait a minute, here it is, I found it.

Not very good, but there they are. What troubles me is not the loss of the poem (OK, a little), but the fact that I can lose a grasp on a thought, one I was sure was there but now is lost. (For once I saw, but now I am blind? Does not make a good hymn lyric.)

It is gone for now. So be it. I wonder if it will come back, but if it does, will I even recognize as the thoughts I had from before? Or will it all seem so new to me? I guess I have to be glad my faith is not like the rest of my thought process. It is there and is not going anywhere.

It occurs to me that the reason for that is simple: my thought process is man-made. My faith was wrought by God, and woven into my very fabric. The man-made is fleeting, temporal, passing. The God wrought is eternal, spiritual, lasting. The two are not comparable, because God is incomparable. The reason for it is not understandable because a divine being is incomprehensible to a finite mind. We cannot understand Him fully, maybe we are just better off writing poems about Him instead. In addition to praying to Him and worshiping Him that is.

I may just have to write a poem about all that one day.

Reflections

Are things winding down or are they just beginning to heat up?

Today is last day of classes and then I am off for a little over three months. Lots of time to think about my fairly new status as a student and how best to manage it going forward. Lots of time to pour into the ministries I have been supporting this past year. Lots of time to plan a get away with the wife this summer.

What I seem to lack is the imagination to deal with these. I am hoping some down time turns into an uplifting time, to allow me to map out what the Lord would have me do the next three months, the rest of the year and into 2010. (2010? Yikes the 00's are almost over! When did that happen? Seems like yesterday I was planning for the end of the world with Y2K. I must have slept in for a big part of the past decade).

So I will focus on thought, on reflection and most of all on prayer. To determine the next step to take to stay firmly planted in the middle of His designated path for me.

For I know that the Lord is not finished with me yet.