Adage #21: Take your soul on vacation.

I took a day off of work a couple of weeks ago for a day long personal prayer retreat. This was the first time I have ever done that and if you haven't done one yet, I would highly recommend it! Here are some things I did and learned:

1.  I am easily distracted when I am at home, so I made a schedule of places to go. I went to a few coffee shops and a local park. I love sitting in coffee shops, so I picked a few of my favorites. Next time I would think more strategically about where I am going since one of the coffee shops was a little to loud and hard to concentrate in. 

2. I left my computer at home. I probably should have left my phone at home, too. Try to go unplugged, you'll be glad you did.

3. I had done a half day prayer retreat about a month before this. That one I planned out specifically what I was going to do with my time. With the full day retreat, I had a general idea in my head, but I didn't write a schedule out like I had done previously. I think it worked both ways. It was nice
to have written down exactly what I wanted to do during my half day retreat since my time was limited. I purposely left my time and activities more open when I did the full day retreat in order to be flexible with what The Holy Spirit wanted to do.

4. Bring your journal and get ready for a serious hand cramp. Since I was moving around to different places, I would start each place journaling and praying. I would also get ready to move on to the next place the same way. I wrote down prayers and my thoughts on the Bible passages I was reading throughout the day and then an overview of the whole day when it was over.

5. Do a prayer walk. I went to a large park in town, left my phone in the car and spent an hour walking around, praying and listening for God's voice. What a good way to get rid of all the distractions!

6. Do the things that connect you most with God. I went to coffee shops and a park because I feel easily connected to God in those places. Go anywhere that you feel that way about or do activiteis that connect you to God. One of my favorite places to do this is the ocean, but since I live 5 hours away from it, I settled for a local pond. It had seagulls, so it was like being at the ocean. After a little while of sitting in a bench, the seagulls choose to fly directly over me and I knew it was time to move or get pooped on.

I hope that you will take the time to do some sort of prayer retreat, whatever might work with your schedule right now. Here are some resources I used to help you get started:

How to Plan a Personal Prayer Retreat

Retreat Finder - This is a great site to search for a retreat center in your area, but know that it does include centers for many different faiths.

Happy retreating!

Adage #20: Get your eyes checked.

Now that I've thrown someone else under the bus concerning vision problems, I can admit to my own story. My office building has nice big windows that look at a hill outside. From those windows, my co-worker Laura and I can enjoy the wildlife. We've seen a lot of birds, squirrels, people walking their dogs, and some neighborhood cats. One of my favorites has been a mom and baby turkey which we saw grow up. And now there's a male turkey chasing around the ladies right outside our window (there's a part of me that hopes he doesn't catch one during office hours).

Laura's desk is the one by the big windows, so when she sees some exciting wildlife adventures going on outside, she'll summon me over to see what is going on. On one day in particular, she asked me to come over because she couldn't tell if what she was looking at was a little cute furry animal or something else. I couldn't figure it out either. After quite a few rounds of squinting, discussing if it was moving or not and then squinting again we were still at a loss. We both expressed our wish to have a pair of glasses at our disposal. It was at that moment that I remembered I did in fact have my glasses in my purse. I went back to my desk,  returned to the window with my glasses on, glanced at the subject of our study and said something deflated like, "Welp..." as I handed my glasses to Laura so she could take a look. In an extremely anticlimactic moment, we realized we had spent all that time looking at stump.

 (This is a tree stump and not a squirrel.)

Jesus spent a lot of his ministry time giving clarity to people. Most people had thought the Messiah promised to them was going to be an earthly king who would be a strong conqueror, but Jesus went so far as to flee the crowds when they wanted to force him into that role (John 6:15). Jesus the Messiah did more than the people could have imagined, he conquered sin for everyone.

The Pharisees never received the clarity Jesus was trying to provide to anyone who would hear what he was saying, they were too busy trying to trap him. The woman at the well (John 4), the woman who touched his garment and was healed (Mark 5) and Andrew and Peter who dropped everything to follow Jesus (John 1); these people experienced Jesus and were given clarity about who he was. This also meant that their lives were drastically changed, they could no longer live like they had before. The knowledge of who Jesus was gave them metaphorical glasses to see the world more clearly.

Is Jesus giving you clarity in certain things? Are you ignoring him or are you letting him transform who you are?

Adage #19: Never give a baby a dog biscuit.

For three and a half years I worked at a large coffee chain. There are always entertaining things happening around you when you work in customer service. The level of entertainment grows exponentially when most of the people you are working with have gotten out of bed between the hours of 3:30-6am. I have no idea how they expected me to be awake enough to serve coffee to the crazy people that chose to be up at 4am. Most of the business at our store was from our drive through window. I have said some absolutely ridiculous things to people while working in that drive through. One time instead of greeting the car at the speaker box with the name of our store, I said, "Welcome to Wandermere donuts." This is a mystical donut shop that does not exist and this greeting led to hysterical laughter from myself, the customer in the car and everyone I was working with. Of course I said it again a week later because I was trying so hard not to say it.

Our customers really liked their dogs and loved when we gave them dog treats (although this is completely against health code, just a little FYI). There were some of my co-workers who loved giving dog treats to customers in our drive through. Shockingly enough, I was not one of those people, but I can appreciate a well behaved dog who isn't trying to attack me as I hand the treat over. I'm really glad that you love your dog, but I do not, especially when it's about to jump out of your car. But I digress, back to the story. One morning I was working with a particular co-worker in the drive through who is just altogether friendly and fun to work with. In fact, she trained me, so I'm a bit partial to her. She is also a better person than I. She was doing her due diligence and cheerfully giving every car with a dog their treasured treat. As I finished making a coffee beverage and I turned to hand it off to her, she looked back at me with a sheepish grin which immediately turned into fits of laughter. She explained to me that she had just offered a dog biscuit to the baby sitting in the back seat.

We often make judgments with our peripheral view. We notice the skateboarder out of the corner of our eye that is about to run us over and we get out of the way. We duck when we see a bird flying right at us from a a glance we caught while shifting our eyes. We make a decision without all of the facts. Our peripheral view is important to keep us safe, but it also can be misleading. Sometimes that bird was really far away or the skateboarder turned the corner and we look like an idiot jumping out of the way for nothing. Our descion turns out to be pretty ill-informed. Or we give a dog biscuit to a baby.

When we take the time to look harder at the peripheral view, we get better clarity and avoid some embarrassing situations. But it's impossible to focus on everything that comes our way, right? When we bring these things to the Lord, he can give us the things we need to focus on. He can help us heal from hurts, let us know we need to let go of the pain someone caused us, he can send us in a specific direction. He might take something out of focus and put something lying in the outskirts to the front and center of our attention.

Earlier this week I took a whole day to do a personal prayer retreat. To take all the stuff running a thousand miles a minute around my brain and dump it all. I put it in front of the Lord and asked him to help me sort through it, what's important and what's not as important? 

When was the last time you spent a significant amount of time in one day with your Creator? What has he been asking you to focus on lately?