Stream of Consciousness/BUSY

A few things I'm dealing with going into the Christmas season.

I'm a victim, again, of being BUSY. BUSY is an acronym. BUSY means "Bound Under Satan's Yoke." A friend and mentor shared that with me, and frankly, I love it.

God's plan was not for me to be so burdened with obligations. That was the plan of my squirrelly little mind. We can get caught so easily in the trap of thinking that our minds are superior to all other aspects of our selves. Someone kindly reminded me today that this isn't so. Mind is subject to the spirit. You know things in spirit that the mind doesn't understand. I know it's important to be kind to other people, and my mind can generate several good and logical reasons to be kind to people. But the mind does not understand love as simply and purely as the spirit does.

In my mind, I often think to myself how grand it is to keep on keepin' on. Get things done. Do good things. Make people happy. Then, feelings of responsibility seep in. Then, you can tie your own failure to the notion of letting people down. Then, you get caught up in a sneaky spiral of self-hatred.

Because it's good to do good things, but ultimately, God's got things under control. There's no need to stretch myself so thin that I snap. There never was.

I tie this into the environmental cause because so much destruction is caused by basic behavior patterns. We are trained to be so busy that we need fast food just to get through the day, and then we sit around in a stupor watching TV at the end of the day. When we slow down, let God be in control, and only take on obligations prayerfully and carefully. God will sometimes tell me to do a thing I wouldn't ordinarily think about, or tell me NOT to do a thing I was really excited about. There has usually never been a negative repercussion for disobeying; I just don't get really blessed, or I don't feel God's presence about whatever it is I'm doing. Which is so key to my existence.

Being so busy has caused me to falter in basic things like praying and reading my Bible. (And other things, like laundry and having food available for consumption). In my mind, these things are time-consuming and getting in the way of MY achieving. Darnit. In passing these things aside, my spirit starves, I don't hear from God as frequently, I don't feel His presence, I'm not calm, I'm not assured in myself. The word "frenetic" comes to mind. Frenetic is fun for about five seconds. Then it feels like an eternal caffeine overdose.

So, I'm trying to lay aside the notion that I'm responsible for things, put them in God's hands, and ask Him to come and cut out some of the craziness I've gotten myself into. It's always so easy to take things on and harder to wriggle out of them... but if my relationship with God comes first, and it does, I'll ask Him to help with it, and He will.