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Meandering

             Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. (Deuteronomy 5:15)

            Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (Deuteronomy 11:19)

       When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them. As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” …But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. (Genesis 19:16-17 & 26) 

       Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14)

 

          OK, I’ll admit it. We’re eight days from New Year’s Eve and in my mind, the anxiety of Christmas is – at best – in the way of my next source of anxiety. As I mentioned to someone yesterday, I’m trying to figure out who I’m going to be and what I’m going to do in 2024. I suspect you’ve seen some clues about that. (OK, stop laughing.)

          The problem with the who and what questions is that they are the wrong questions. It’s like trying to figure out what I want to be and have and on what principles I want to base my being and having. I started skimming a book about finding my “why” and that takes me back to Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” If we figure out our why, the what and how will follow.

          And part of figuring out ones why involves remembering where we came from but moving deeper in the memory to understand our motivation, not just our actions. After that, we need desperately not to get stuck in our memories, which will paralyze us or turn us to “pillars of salt.”

          I mentioned to someone recently that I seem to be all caught up in the process of becoming useful instead of simply being useful. I suspect it’s my own version of posting selfies every thirty seconds so everyone tells me that I’m wonderful, loved, looking good, good enough, etc. In other words, my real why tends to be selfish. It’s a kind of immaturity that can’t seem to understand that anything has permanence - a sort of separation anxiety that probably results from abandonment issues.

          But one of the things the book I’m skimming mentions is that one’s why is one’s reason when one is being one’s best self. The problem is that our less-than-best-selves often gets in the way of our best selves. And that may be the thing we need most to learn – to get out of everyone’s best way, including our own.

 

 

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