good causes.

I've been reading Shauna Niequist's Cold Tangerines.  and I love it.  because it is helping me refocus on God in the everyday.  I mean, I'm like everyone else.  I can see Him in the BIG stuff ... answered prayers, cool worship services, good conversations, good people, missions.  But I overlook Him in the rush of my life.  a. lot.  Here are some of her thoughts that have me thinking tonight:

"In all of my scrambling to do the right things and be the right person, I miss some of the most important things I think  God might be asking me to do.  For a lot of different reasons, for the better part of the last several years, I have been way too busy for interruptions.  I worked and worked on behalf of a good cause, at the expense of all the things I would have seen if I had slowed down enough to look around ,my life.  I wanted to be productive and useful and focused and I turned into someone who was frazzled and scarred and who could not bear the emotional weight of her own life, let alone someone else's.  I don't want to be that person.  And I am ashamed that I let myself move so far from who I wanted to be."

Can I just be her?  Cause I am pretty sure that all she said is all I said inside myself, just not as eloquently.  I, too, let the urgent, busy work I "have" to do make me too frazzled, too tired, too overwhelmed to do the things that I most value.  the things that make me most me.  the things that look most like God.  And like her, I don't want to be that person.

"This week listening to God and doing what it seemed like He was asking looked a lot like doing nothing, really.  I changed plans and bought gifts and said prayers and made a little bed on the couch for my friend who needed a soft place for the night, and the most important thing about this is that there is nothing particularly noble or difficult about anything I did.  I did the average things that needed to be done in the lives of people around me.  And I'm in a really good mood about the whole thing, because I think I'm catching on to something that God wanted from me all along."

I, too, have found those glimpses of the person I want to be in the little things.  Even this week, the TVs been on a little less, I've responded to people a little more ... a text here and there, a phone call, an email, a card ... birthday gifts got mailed.  Plans were made to craft and create.  And still it can be overwhelming ... when I look back at yesterday's lists of people I am praying for and things I am concerned about, those little things seem to entirely inadequate, but they are a start.  Again, to think of brushing my teeth every day for the rest of my life.  OVERWHELMING!!  To think of caring for everyone I want/need to care for every day without fail .. OVERWHELMING.  SO, today, I will listen a little closer to the whispers.  I will act and not put off what is on my heart.  And I will celebrate feeling a little more like the person God made me to be and a little less like the tired, overwhelmed, frazzled person who left my office today.