I love tulips! And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage. If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food. You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.
Power of Choice
Why do we care what other people think?
When People are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man by Edward T. Welch, P & R Publishing, 1997. Published in cooperation with The Christian Counseling and Education Foundation.
This past Sunday, during an excellent sermon drawn from the book of Romans, my pastor cited a term that was new to me: “imposter syndrome.” According to an article in Forbes magazine and other sources, this condition occurs when seemingly confident and capable people are plagued by the fear of being exposed as frauds. “Everyone thinks I’m so great. If they only knew!”
Sounds pretty normal to me! And very biblical, to boot. The Christian view of man says that we’re all incapable of saving ourselves and in desperate need of someone else to do it for us. and that someone is Christ. Our sinful nature explains why we’re so messed up when it comes to our reactions to both the accolades and the taunts of other people. We fear them more than we fear God. As I listened to the sermon I was reminded of this book and decided to use it for this week’s post.
Tool Costs
I seem to be on a tool tear, as it were. Over the past several weeks I’ve written about using Scrivener as a writing tool, my little laptop as a bill-paying tool, and habits as tools to help lend structure to my life. But . . . I’ve also emphasized that tools don’t do the work for us. So I’m dedicating this post to two non-tool-users, Woody Allen and K. Lee ScottProcrastination Meltdown
You know that warning given about mutual funds and other investments: “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.” Well, if you’re a regular reader of the blogs on this website you may remember my post over in the food section about the last Cherry Creek Chorale retreat breakfast, which I said was pretty stress-free. I had things done ahead of time and it was almost a little bit boring to be standing around and waiting for the crowds to descend.
I should have remembered the slogan given above. Just because I did it right once doesn’t mean I’m going to do it right again. So I found myself strangely reluctant to get going this time. I wasn’t making anything too demanding, not like the previous sweet-roll extravaganza. Just homemade granola with yogurt and my signature green-chili-cheese-corn casserole. It was as if I thought that the lack of procrastination from last time would magically carry over to this time. But of course that wasn’t true.
The Allergy Analogy
Man! What’s in the air these days? Nothing much is blooming yet, but I’m having an awful, disgusting, terrible time with my allergies. If I’m not blowing my nose, I’m coughing. I feel horrible. All I can hope for is that whatever it is goes away soon.
I’ve been treated extensively over the past 4 1/2 years in an effort to get rid of these symptoms. I’ve been tested by the well-known “prick test.” I’ve used allergy drops under my tongue every day for about four years. I’ve had sinus surgery. I’ve been prescribed nasal sprays and oral medications. And still my problems persist. Tonight I have chorale rehearsal and plan to sit in the back where I can blow my nose without disturbing everyone around me. I’ll also take a day-time cold remedy, which helps some, and squirt my current not-very-effective-but-better-than-nothing nasal spray up my poor beleaguered nose.
Phone-Call Procrastination
Saturday I took my last blood-pressure pill and my last sleeping pill. It will be about a week before I get the new medications in the mail. While it’s just as well for me not to have the sleeping pills and therefore have to get through the night without them, going without my b.p. meds even for such a short time is certainly not recommended.
You know what you know . . .
. . . because you believe what you believe.
Sounds as if I got my terms mixed up, doesn’t it? But I didn’t. I first heard this statement many, many years ago from the evangelist Bill Rice III, son of the founder of the Bill Rice Ranch in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. (The BRR is a Christian camp that began primarily as a ministry for deaf children, brought about because the Rices’ daughter Betty was deaf. As far as I can tell from the website, it’s still going strong today.) It wasn’t original with him at all, but it stuck with me from that sermon.
Eliminate . . .
. . . and concentrate.
Great advice from Christian writer and speaker Anne Ortlund, who died in November 2013. I’ll be doing a book club post on Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, her 1977 classic, later on this month.
For now, though, I’ll just concentrate on these three words. You may think, well, easy enough for her to say. What on earth can I eliminate? I’d love to concentrate just on what I love the most, what I feel most called to do, but hey! What am I supposed to do with all this other stuff that’s been thrust upon me?
No easy answers here. I do think, though, that sometimes we take on responsibilities that don’t belong to us. Many years ago I read a statement in a Bible Study Fellowship commentary that would have saved me from some unwise commitments of my own had I followed it. I can’t quote it exactly and can’t remember what we were studying at the time. The general idea, though, was that if you take on something that really should be done by someone else, not only are you overextending yourself and probably therefore shirking your real obligations, but you are crowding out someone else who could and should do that job. Isn’t that an interesting idea? Your overcommitment is someone else’s deprivation.
Plans are worthless . . .
. . but planning is everything.
This saying is attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and to be honest it didn’t make sense to me at first. Plans almost always go awry in some way, but that’s not the same as saying that plans are useless.
Substitute the word “preparation” for “planning” and the meaning becomes much clearer. I was reminded as I worked on this post of a talk I heard many years ago at an educational conference by Dr. Jerry Tetreau. He was speaking about the importance of being prepared to teach, using the Latin word praeparō, meaning “to make ready in advance.” If you’re prepared, then a change in plans won’t throw you. And there are always changes in plans, no matter how well thought out they may be.
Back in the mid-1970’s I saw a great illustration of this principle. A fellow graduate student was doing her speech recital, a dramatic presentation on Catherine Booth, the wife of William F. Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. There she was, up on stage all by herself, costumed in a cape and hat, when suddenly something started flying around the stage. She kept going. Eventually, I think, the critter disappeared, but she never missed a beat, and she finished the recital to great applause. Know what it was? A bat. How would you ever plan for such a thing? The truth is, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. You could only prepare.
Further small thoughts . . .
. . . on the importance of small things!
I quote here an example given many years ago by Sparky Pritchard, then an associate pastor at my church. He was talking specifically about Bible study, but this analogy could apply in many areas:
Sometimes people ask what they should do when they don’t feel like reading the Bible, or don’t feel as if they’re getting anything out of it. I tell them that you don’t always enjoy it. Sometimes your Bible study time is like taking your vitamins: totally unexciting, but you know it’s good for you. Other times your experience may be more like eating a bowl of cold cereal: It’s nourishing and somewhat tasty, but not all that great. But then you experience the Bible as if it’s peaches and cream. Here’s the thing, though: you never get to that dessert stage without being willing to go through the vitamins stage. In other words, you have to be consistent: do the (seemingly) small thing of being in the Word daily.
Just as I said a couple of days ago: the small series of faithful actions adds up.