The Sylvr Pen

 Five Minute Friday here. The word prompt this week: Vivid.

[Go!]

“Vivid” makes me think of color. Brilliant hues in contrast. Eye-catching. Easy to see. Even for eyes losing their ability. Going blind. Like they say mine are.

Just one year ago, almost to this day, I learned something was wrong.

He wouldn’t tell me just what, the optometrist, just that there was “something else” besides early cataracts he wanted the ophthalmologist  to look at. His agitation hinted that it wasn’t trivial.

Turned out to be Fuchs’ Dystrophy, an unstoppable, incurable deteriorating corneal condition. Slowly I’d lose clarity, ability to distinguish shades of blues, lines of demarcation.

So, come spring, I went out and bought scads of vivid flowers, contrasting joys, to plant in my usually monochrome beds.

But a year has passed and as I look out on the winter lawn, I can still see clearly each dazzle of snow crystal catching sun, every sharp line of shadow.

It’s going more slowly than I feared. Why I’m not sure. People are praying. I’m taking vitamins.

But slow or fast, there’s grace in this thing. I always appreciated my vision, but now so much more. Of every thing I can discern!

And…

The verse that started echoing that day, and all down through the past year… it echoes still in my head and heart:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cr 2:9).

The most vivid things that I can see now are but a pale foretaste of things to come: dazzle to the utmost!

[Stop!]

Linked to

Crisis!

Laundry in chaos!

Drudgery Mountain, approaching Everest proportions! Never conquered. You climb, and the mountain just increases in altitude!

You get home from work, or finish the morning homeschooling (or whatever), and realize the need of that dark shirt buried in the bin. But clothes occupy the washer. Wet clothes. So they must go in the dryer, but the dryer’s full of laundry you didn’t get to folding…

You’re in a hurry. (As usual. Isn’t life just one demand pushing another aside continually, like children jostling for attention?) So you gather out the dry and dump it… where? Living room sofa! Throw wets into dryer, darks into wash! Get both machines going! Now, we have to run that errand…

Maybe while you’re on the errand, eldest son comes in, “needs” his bin-buried jeans. Guess what he does?…

By the time you return home, what you dumped on the sofa trails onto the floor, pushed aside by what you stuffed in the dryer, and your dark load lies tangled damp atop the dryer. Dear son’s jeans et al are tossing serenely within it, but everything else is wrinkled! And overwhelming.

This scene (or its like) replays repeatedly across America. Laundry seems to loom over life, dominate minds, interrupt the beautiful, the worshipful, the sweet and pleasant, with its incessant nagging demand for attention.

I once inhabited this drama (to a greater or lesser extent—and I’m not telling which), my mind dominated by, or interrupted  by… the great, earthshakingly important issue of…

Laundry crisis!

Truly.

But then…

A Homeschool conference. A class, “Time Management for Women.”

Words from instructor Pat Berg, which I never-after forgot: “Turn your crises into routines.”

Words of supreme wisdom! (I thank my God on every remembrance of her!)

This changed my life.

Because I started doing it. One crisis at a time.

Or, one area in which I longed for improvement, for greater beauty and benefit. (Like now, my spiritual life, my closeness to God.)

How did this work?

Key word = Routine

Key ingredients of Routine:

1) A set time. Scheduled. Same time each day, ideally. My best time = as early as possible.

(For laundry, this meant right after waking, making bed, and dressing.)

(My present priority, time alone with God, pre-empts laundry in that sequence.)

2) Reasonable time allotted (scheduled!) for the doing. Neither too little nor way too much. 

Time the task or endeavor. You might be shocked.

A big wash load, start to finish, including all folded or hung and put away, takes but fifteen minutes‘ hands-on. Really. Try it! Don’t dawdle, but don’t kill yourself either!

3) Do. One. Thing. (Emphasize each word separately, last to first) —

Thing: What precisely will I complete in this time slot?

One: Keep the task small. And don’t try simultaneous accomplishments!

Drop all multi-tasking illusions. Latest research shows it lengthens task time, lessens work quality, even temporarily lowers worker IQ! (Google this stuff if you don’t believe me.)

(So don’t try reviewing darling daughter’s spelling or watch TV as you fold laundry. Focus on task instead. Enjoy fresh smells, neat folds and smoothness — and the victory of everything cleared away in so few minutes.

Do: Do, do, do it. Barring fire, blood, or criminal invasion, complete the task started.

4) Regular repetition. Repeat over 21 to 28 consecutive weekdays, and, experts say, you’ll get a routine going. Continue the routine through the next month, and you’ll move well into HABIT! 

I’m applying this whole approach to closer intimacy with God. Regular times, regular place(s), if possible. (How much time do I need to settle and focus? What can I use for a focus point — a verse of scripture, perhaps? What exactly will I do in this time slot? Read three Bible chapters? Or meditate on one, fully and unhurriedly? Or, review my memorization? Or pray — what kind of prayers? Or just stop and call on Him to make me aware of His presence in my crazy day? Etc. You get the idea.)

I have tons to do in this area. But I’m not trying tons at once. Just one thing at a time. Like with laundry.

[A note about interrupting children: Get them on your team, and use the opportunity for them to learn with you. Let them watch you fold, smell the freshness, feel warm smoothness, man the timer as you “race.” You never know, they might get enamored of doing laundry, folding smoothly, “racing the timer” themselves. Maybe you’ll even work yourself out of a job if you make it appealing enough. My Mom did this with ironing, with her little girl (me). Have fun with this. And God bless it!]

“3. Resolved, If ever I shall fall and grow dull, so as to neglect to keep any part of these Resolutions, to repent of all I can remember, when I come to myself again.”

– Jonathan Edwards, in his own Resolutions, begun in his teenage years.

One of the reasons the experts give for the third Monday in January being the gloomiest day of the year (I assume in the Northern Hemisphere) is “failed resolutions.”

OOOGAH-OOOGAH-OOOGAH! MISNOMER ALARM!! How can a resolution for a whole year be failed by the third week? The very word resolution means determination, even when one has fallen short, or even completely messed up. Resolution gets back up, dusts itself off, and picks up where it left off…

OR makes wise modifications and starts all over again.

The modifications may be the real life savers.

How would you like (even though we’ve already passed mid-January) still to get to the end of 2012 with five or six new well-established habits? Without stress. (A habit here is a small routine you carry out with steadfastness.)

This is possible. Without angst. Without strain.

If. You. Keep it. Simple.

New habit building is. 

Simple.

If we let it be.

But we don’t.

We make it complicated.

Because simple looks unimpressive. Boring. Complicated looks heroic.

Keep it simple.

You don’t think six or seven. You think. Just. One.

You don’t think whole big year. You think “till the end of February.” Or something like that.

You realize that one month of steady repetition will make a routine. And if you just continue, steady, for another month of that routine, you’re getting into a real habit.

If I get a new routine-becoming-habit fairly well established by March 1, say, or April 1, then I can begin working on another, as I almost automatically continue the first. My second habit can be making its own rut by June, a third by August, a fourth by October… Get it? Don’t sweat it!

This worked for me with laundry, which, honestly I now do not mind doing. In fact, now I rather enjoy it, folding the warm linens and clothes, smelling their freshness…

And so far this same method has been working in the spiritual area over the past two years, and this month, too, as I continue and expand my aspirations.

Next post, I’ll share with you how this came about, how it works specifically, in detail, in either housekeeping or spiritual (or any other) discipline.

I hope you’ll stop back then, and in the meantime, I hope you’re showing yourself some mercy and grace:

First, it’s grace to consider what you have achieved. Each single time you did the good thing you wanted, you made a step in the right direction. And you know what every journey begins with.

Second, you might show yourself mercy and (re)consider your aspirations. Are they a little too over-the-top? Can you break them down into smaller sub-habits, baby steps more achievable, less stressing, and, like Jesus, keep your burden light?

Third, it helps immensely to realize the first thing Jonathan Edwards said in his Resolutions: “… I am unable to do any thing without God’s help, [so] I do humbly entreat Him, by His grace, to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to His will, for Christ’s sake.”

Stay tuned.

(Now I must go attend to my messy kitchen!)

*****

Related Posts:

The Big Importance of Small Things

Best: Small Steps and Slow

Linked to

Walk with Him Wednesdays

I saw it with my own eyes: the evidence, good and bad.

I thought gloom predominated posts I read yesterday, at least in their opening paragraphs.

And yet, with a bunch of  them, after that…

But more on that in a minute.

7:05 this morning:

Dressed, having pushed myself to do it, I shuffle from laundry room into kitchen for a coffee refill. Behind me water shooshes onto clothes and soap. In front of me the radio goes silent and Husband appears around the corner, from where he just sat on his high stool, bent down close to hear the news.

He turns abrupt to the calendar dangling on the wall, points a finger, counts.

“Yeah. That’s right,” he murmurs. “The 19^th. That was the third Monday in January.”

He’s just heard the experts declare that day the year’s gloomiest. And yes. That’s when his first wife wrote the tragic note to explain the overdose she was about to inflict on herself.

Reasons, he says. Reasons they give for gloom: cold gray weather, days still short, failed resolutions…

He has my attention. I’m standing erect without purposing it, awake without the coffee. Yes, I  saw that yesterday, in people’s blog posts. At first.

I was pretty draggy myself. Trying to energize after flu, not progressing much in that direction. When I got done writing, adding photos, posting, and linking, I was bushed! Physically drained, shaky. You wouldn’t think doing up a blog post and a bunch of pics would do that. But now it makes more sense. Yesterday took extra effort. (Today does almost as much.)

I read some others’ posts after that, and yes, nearly every one started out blue-gray.

But every one turned brighter, somewhere along their lines of words. Why?

These Christian writers determined to give thanks when they didn’t feel like it, to count blessings obvious and not-so-obvious, to see God’s grace even in gloom. All saw God somehow present amid the clouds. One (most  helpful to me) listed graces and blessings in Christ alone.

Some were working through some really sad or bad stuff right this January. But by the end of each post there was hope, at least a feeble cheer, and sometimes something so much stronger, fortifying both writer and reader (me).

My own post didn’t mention my own droopy starting point, just opened with my declaration of intent instead. But producing it lifted me even as it tired me, and my own words that cheered me most also focused on Christ’s gifts in Himself.

So there it is: strong evidence that looking for the gifts in the grayness,  and thanking the good Giver, really does help lift us from the ash heap, whether a little or a lot!

*****

Linked to…

Entering into His gates with thanksgiving this morning, and His courts with praise collected through the week. Reveling in rest and recuperation of the body emerging slow from illness, and from VanWinkle-like sleep!

The collection:

beauty through a winter window: snow-highlighted shrub grown tall

sitting with my bruised Bible, prayers within

a pen in hand that scribes smooth

sweet peach pie husband made and froze last fall, resurrected from the freezer

slightly sour pickle relish on a hot hamburger

just right, just perfect burger beef, fresh and lean, healthily grass-fed and local

three green graces in winter’s gray:

frosted multi-colored moss on rock

dipping branches of evergreens sheltering remnant green of grass

parsley peeking through the snow, still pluckable in January

slashing of sleet on window glass, underlining inside warmth

strong bong of a faithful clock, keeping hours near a century

off-key whistling, indicating contentment in the off-key whistler

hot cocoa on a cold day

Something above me, something below me, something beside, something beneath me: “Oh the deep, deep love of Jesus,” “the ocean of His love,” as “it lifts me up to glory… for it lifts me up to” God.

Grace in sickness:

needs all met by His love and care, coincidences and surprises

surprising quiet in the day, noisy outdoor work suspended, tires snow-muffled on the road.

comfort of warm flannel reaching to my toes

snuggly “spa jacket,” warming yet more in bed

 warm room, fluffy blankets, to sweat away a fever

freshness of sudden cool air, startling me awake on opening its morning door

cold swallows of icy orange juice in a dry throat

stars surprising at midnight rising, out a darkened pane

sleep — deep, repeating sleep, satisfying a body greedy for it

Nothing I can do but sleep; yet His love flows full, requires no noble works, no heroic performances, just trust and rest. Grace. All grace.

*****