back on track

{I think sometimes I take myself a bit too seriously. I get into this mindset where every thing is a life-changing moment, and I forget to enjoy myself. I don’t stop and smell the roses. I forget to laugh, and I love laughing and joking around and just smiling or smirking for no reason at all. As I look back through what I’ve written, I’m surprised that any of you have even stuck around this long. It isn’t all that uplifting or even happy. And that just doesn’t seem right.

So now, you lucky readers get to suffer through my attempts at cleverness and wit (and feel free to tell me how not clever I am after you finish). Because sometimes I’d rather laugh than think deep thoughts. Besides, being sarcastic and irreverent comes a bit too naturally to me. I could explain, but you’ll understand in a minute.}

I’ve been working on my relationship with God over the last few months. Many of you might be thinking, really just the last few months? Isn’t that kind of late in the game? Yeah, probably. But some of us get distracted or are really great procrastinators or just have absolutely no idea what we’re doing in this world. After awhile, its just easier to find other things to occupy your time in order to avoid that stern look you can imagine God giving you as He stares at you from heaven. (Freaky right?) That being said, I’ve discovered there are some things that, while you are trying to get your relationship with God back on track, you should probably just avoid.

1. tumblr and/or Pinterest. Nothing will suck you in and refuse to let you go like websites full of cute pictures, funny quotes, and wedding ideas (that last one is mostly for the ladies). We say that we’re just going to check it out without signing up, but you know that’s a lie. After a few hours you have a blog set up or boards that you just can’t stop pinning things to. Everyone is following you, complimenting you on your great taste and eye for color, and before you know it seven months has gone by, your friends don’t remember your name, and you realize you’ve been wearing the same pair of yoga pants for a week straight and could probably use a shower. Resist! (Sidenote: I think the male equivalent of this would probably be anything pertaining to sports or Youtube… the videos you guys find both amazes and disturbs me.)

2. Subscriptions to Hulu or Netflix. Television is one of my weaker links. I am easily amused. Give me a decent plot and a few jokes (maybe an attractive guy with a British accent), and I’m sold. Back in the day, you had one chance during the week to watch your favorite shows, and if you didn’t start a season from the beginning like every other normal person, you’d just have to pray that you could figure out who loved who, and who was secretly having an affair with who, and didn’t that guy already die? But not anymore. Now those of us who don’t like to commit to a show until we can be sure that its going to be around for awhile can just sign into Netflix and start from the beginning. (Of course, this leaves us about two years behind everyone else, and you just sound ridiculous in conversations.) Fifty episodes and a million confused tweets later, you realize that maybe you didn’t start watching the show to begin with, because quite frankly its just terrible.

3. Devotionals. They mean well, those lovely books with inspirational sayings and uplifting Bible verses. They try to make your personal time with God easier. And of course for some, they are a godsend. But for others it’s a huge book of guilt. You’ll do so well for about a week, then you decide you want to go out for dinner and a movie, and your devotional time gets postponed until tomorrow, and then tomorrow you just don’t want to have to read two devotions so you skip it altogether. After a week you think, hey maybe I’ll just pick up where I left off, so you go to that day’s devotion and suddenly become irrationally afraid that you missed something important in one of the ones you skipped, but can’t bring yourself to do seven in one night, because you’re “exhausted.” About a month after buying the book, you feel it glaring at you and you can imagine it saying, “Really, you couldn’t even last a month?” but you can’t throw it away because, well, it has Bible verses in it. Not worth it.

4. Drama. We like to think that every little thing that happens in our life is an “event.” I could be nice and say that every little part of your day is significant, but let’s face it, no one really wants to know what you ate for breakfast, why the guy you sat next to is to die for, or how many sit ups you did that day. That being said, when people drag us into their “issues,” they probably aren’t really any more important than all those tweets you wrote yesterday. Instead of worrying about your own problems, now you’re stressed out because all these things going on in your friends’ lives, and you swear some soap opera writer must be orchestrating this whole thing because no one should being dealing with all that stuff at once. Don’t let your friends pull you into their world and out of your own.

5. Negativity. You deserve to be happy in life. Granted, this is easier for some people than others. And that’s fine. No two people are ever going to be the same. But I believe that its easier to be sad than happy. Its easy to get lost in our frustrations and disappointments. And when you are searching for a way out of that, when you are looking for a bit of sunshine to clear the shadows of your mind, its probably not the best idea to hang around more shadows. You aren’t going to find a light at the end of the tunnel if you keep moving into the dark. So ditch the dreary clouds and move to brighter and happier things. You won’t have a chance for happiness if don’t put yourself in a place where you can find it.

So there you are, a few of the things I’ve been trying in order to get my life back to where I want it to be. If you have other ideas (or think mine are terrible and/or my humor left something to be desired) let us in on your brilliance. God meets us all in different ways, so everyone has a different story to tell.