Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

As I wrap up week 1 of CG, I am impressed with a few key ideas to consider, and better, to figure out how to work into my life. As I've journaled in the past, many issues that I face are long standing ones. I have difficulty getting through lifestyle issues, that is putting bad habits to rest. I more so let them linger, and the older I get, the more set they get. It will not be easy to change these lingering bad behaviors, but I find myself in a place where they must be changed if I am really going to get a hold of God, or rather, allow God to get a hold of me.

The ideas:

Character is formed by the choices we make. This is consistent with Anthony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within, and so it resonates at this moment.
One way communication with God. I've often struggled with listening for God. I believe a good starting place would be practicing the things that have helped me feel close to God: listening to worship, praying out loud, experiencing God's beauty in nature, serving people. Doing these things, I hope, will help me feel more connected with God so that I can listen for Him.
Sin. There are ways that I let sin persist in my thought life. I think negatively. I think too much about sex. I can be spiteful. And in my actions I can be trivial (getting pouty and huffy when I don't get what I want). These sins to my soul have their biggest impact on my largeness. That is, the keep me small, and not in a good way. It's not so much that there smallness keeps me humble as, somehow, it keeps me from humility. Humility is born out of largeness, out of existing in wide open terrain, God's country!

"God, what have you to put into my mind now if only I can be large enough?", Laubach wrote. I ask that same question. Living with God is certainly not accomplished by acting trivially or by being or thinking small. At the same time, Living with God must begin where I am right now. I cannot skip steps, unless God takes me from one place to another. There is a slowness to the pursuit of God, a journey that separates the wheat from the chaff, that purifies. As I have discerned in times past, and perhaps it is time to discern fresh: Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast.

Dear Lord Jesus, help me to be still, to take You at Your word, to sit and listen. And when I feel I have heard, help me to act.

In Jesus Name,

Amen

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