I once again got carried away by doing and thinking about the choral society website, to the elimination of much time for prayer. It has encroached on sleep, work, prayer, fasting. This has got to stop.
I’m going to try to make it stop by allowing for bigger swaths of time working on it in the plan for the day.
Carla insisted the four of us go outside in the 6–8 inches of snow after dinner this evening, and I’m glad she did. We pulled the kids around on their sleds, enjoyed the scenery and relative silence, sledded down the steps of the new footbridge and down the hill near Meadow Lane. O Lord, You’re beautiful.
I finished the proactive portion of my Christmas shopping today. All that remains is about seven tasks that are queued up in Remember the Milk. I mention this as the most significant portion of my day today because I’m still not completely comfortable with multi-step, very detail-oriented projects whose deliverable are people I. The discomfort is a lack of confidence that I have thought of everything and am making proper progress. It causes me to ponder over my project management systems instead of getting things done. And it leads to me idolizing and being selfish about my time.
Lord, as usual: Help!
In other news, we discovered last night that Zeppelin is on Spotify. I exclaimed to Carla that this news trumped the handbell concert as my high yesterday.
Éa and I enjoyed the above concert today very much. Plus, we got to see Jimmy Hutasoit, Jo Lash, Joyce Robinson, Dana Carlisle, and a Russell Bloom who heavy-handedly—literally, with lots of downward pressure applied on my left shoulder by his hand—tried again to recruit me to Pirates of Penzance.
I got a flu shot today.
Carla thinks I’m goofy for thinking it such a big deal. And I guess I’m not sure why I think it’s a big deal. Maybe it’s because it’s my first medical interaction that I’ve had on my own behalf for a few years, and it’s proactive and preventative, which is rare for me. Maybe it’s because it’s a signal that I’m part of the mainstream of modern humanity, unlike many other parts of my life (e.g. home birth, not consuming a lot).
Going to bed on time seems optional one or two days, but it becomes crucial to happiness by week’s end.
Carla called me intense this evening at the College Township holiday party and appreciation dinner at the Nittany Lion Inn. Too much face. She meant it as an constructive putdown. Boy, did it dampen my mood. But she’s right: I need to control my energy in social situations that are tied to exciting ideas or where I feel my reputation for something good (singing, progressive vision for the township) goes ahead of me.
Now may our God and Father Himself and Jesus our Lord direct our way to you; and may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all people…so that He may establish your hearts without blame in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints.
— Paul in 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13
A gentle sense of Your presence in my life suffused my soul today after work as I reflected on the verse above. Life was good today, and the verse above indicates that love makes us majestically holy. Wow.
While shopping for a Christmas gift for my mom, I found online lists of the best worship albums of the year. I felt convicted: Why have I not been more avid a seeker of music that is not only musically marvelous but thematically rich? Why have I not more frequently combined my favorite medium (music) with my favorite theme (God)?
I put the “concentrate mightily” bit into action today at work. And I enjoyed work more today than I have in a while.
Grumpiness is a sign that I have not properly handled some other negative emotion. Today, for instance, I didn’t properly handle my feeling tired, having run from to grocery shopping with Éa to unpacking the car to choosing a Christmas tree to decorating for Christmas with Janet over, all without taking a breath.
Put another way, I didn’t guard my heart, tending to it when it was tired, and as a result, it, my wellspring of life (Proverbs 4:23) started to taste bad.
I need to start exploring and expressing negative emotions before they herniate as grumpiness.
(Once again, this mini-revelation came after I asked God to speak to me.)
We stopped in Danville on our way home from Rowland to pick up a brace-and-bit. Cassie Weaver had picked it up for us. We got to see her apartment, nibble on some fudge her mom had graciously given her to give to us, watch a few minutes of the PSU-Wisconsin football game, and then treat her to chicken cheese steak dinner at the sub shop across the street from the Danville Sub Shop, whatever its name is.
All that to say: I’d like to start incorporating friendly and relaxing stopovers into all our trips. Doing so would break up the drive, build relationships, and often lead to yummy food.
Shortly after praying tonight that God help me connect with Him, I was reminded that I feel most connected to Him when I apply deliberate, singular concentration to whatever it is I’m doing. I’m so easily distracted by other things I want that I think this serial single-mindedness good practice regardless of its capacity for facilitating divine connection.
NB: Not only concentration, but might. As it’s written: “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men” (Colossians 3:23) and “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
Now that I’m back to multi-day stretches when I barely leave the house, the “most significant thing that happened to me today” will likely be boring. Like this one.
“You don’t know in advance whether God is going to set you to do something difficult or painful, or something that you will quite like; and some people of heroic mould are disappointed when the job doled out to them turns out to be something quite nice.”
— C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (p. 53–54), in response to “Is it true that Christians must be prepared to live a life of personal discomfort and sacrifice in order to qualify for ‘Pie in the Sky’?”
The recent thing You’ve been emphasizing to me is the part he says about folks with the ‘heroic mould.’
Not much went on today (for me, anyway—the kids had a snow day and dentist appointments, and Carla is on the verge of her doula gig for Rebecca Lundin), so I’ll say that the most important thing from today was my continued procrastination in doing the DiamondBack manuals work. I prayed for Your help, though, so hopefully tomorrow will bring an improvement in dedication (despite Carla likely being out doula’ing or just out of commission from having doula’ed).
Oh, and there: It’s my first Internet cat pic, taken by Carla while we worked on Christmas shopping from the futon mattress in its living room configuration:
At Barb’s prompting at church today with some help from having talked with Ethan last night, I recapped what I meant by church last week having changed my life: In the same way that I’ve ceased wanting to be a great singer and begun just singing, blowing away my received application of Matthew 24:14 has finally allowed me to cease wanting to be a great Christian and begin just Christ-ing.
Carla and I parted ways for the evening after a noisy, meh-but-enjoyable “food fair” (glorified, overpriced kosher hot dog party) at Congregation Brit Shalom: She to a council meeting, the kids and I downtown for the tree lighting ceremony. We missed the actual lighting by literally three seconds but enjoyed the tree anyway, along with hot chocolate, popcorn, secular Christmas tunes, Animal Kingdom, the bathroom at Irving’s with Éa while Sullivan waiting in line with Lucy S-M & her mom, dancing on my shoulders, and Sullivan on Santa’s lap asking for mittens and a whole dinosaur skeleton for Christmas.
But the real pick of the day today is how much time I spent crafting simple HTML email signatures at work. Was it a waste of time? My desires said no, but perhaps it wasn’t the highest priority. Why do I let myself get carried away with trifles?
“Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 2).
This is for you, friend: This verse is a greeting and general prayer for well-being for Gaius, not unlike what we would write in a letter today (if we really meant it), not evidence that all Christians should be wealthy.
“I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth” (3 John 4).
This is my prayer for my children. Please hear it.
“For they went out for the sake of the Name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. Therefore we ought to support such men, so that we may be fellow workers with the truth” (3 John 7-8)
God, I want to be a fellow worker with the truth. That’s why I want to join in Your work in the Maldives somehow. (And this is a good, healthier replacement for great, self-sacrificial interpretation of Matthew 24:14 that the church obliterated for me last week.)
To further Sullivan’s penchant for architecture and craft, and at his request, we made paper airplanes today in my office for our date. We also did some tangrams right before bed—and he beat me in making the square.
Rich Biever sent me good news today: Rehearsals for LES MIS start two days after the Choral Society’s spring concert and go for just four weeks before curtain. That means an intense rehearsal schedule, but a compact one. That’s good news for my relationships with Carla, Sullivan & Éa, and it’s good news for our budget (less babysitting needed because of concurrent township council meetings).
Don, a fellow tenor at the Choral Society, shared with me this evening that last week at his usual post-rehearsal social hour at Texas Roadhouse, Russ Shelley, the music director of the Choral Society, gushed momentarily about the beauty and power of my voice.
Obviously, that’s a heady sort of thing to hear. It inspires me to pursue more opportunities to share my voice. But at first, at least, this inspiration feels akin to the addictive high that I imagine you get from using recreational drugs. That’s dangerous.
It’s good to sing for my own enjoyment (or Yours, God), and it’s good to sing to delight someone else. But it’s unhealthy to sing to elicit praise.
Father, as I get deeper into singing performance in State College, please protect me from the intoxicating effects of people’s praise.
To put it roughly, church today obliterated the misapplication of Matthew 24:14, so continually argued by John Piper, the Perspectives course I took at the Teen Mania Honor Academy, and really, every missiologist I’ve ever encountered, that we all must be involved in world evangelization in some way or else we are less-than Christians. That if the idea that if Matthew 24:14 doesn’t move me to proactively involved myself missions, then I don’t actually love Jesus’ coming or love God with all my heart, mind, soul & strength.
The removal of this thorn in my devotional side is a big deal: As Matt and I discussed during our walk on Friday, neither of us has ever been able to completely shake the idea that we are falling short because we haven’t yet made an extraordinary, life-altering, self-sacrificial decision for the sake of others’ God-borne happiness. I think I have finally shrugged if off.
In its place, the idea is that I can be the “sort of people [I] ought…to be in holy conduct...
// read full article →