I’m pretty sure that I’ve already posted the following quotation, but I’m going to do it again anyway. I’ve read Anne Ortlund’s Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman multiple times and talked about before. She was a writer and pastor’s wife who died several years ago. I think I ran across DOTBW in the bookstore of my old church. I remember reading it while on early-morning duty at the school where I taught and a high-school boy making a snide remark about the title.
Anyway, if you’ve already heard all that, below is the quotation that I thought about yesterday and today as I pushed myself to do the things I was supposed to do and restrain myself from giving in to the impulse of the moment. Yesterday the impulse was to get up from the computer and make granola and croutons instead of sticking to my writing schedule. ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ I said to myself. ‘You said you were going to put in a certain number of hours per day on projects that might, by some stretch of he imagination, make money.’ So I stayed with it, and my current project inched a few more inches towards completion.
Today I had to nudge myself to go ahead and do the grocery shopping after my Bible Study Fellowship leaders’ meeting. (Have I mentioned that wonderful organization before? Oh, right.) There’s a grocery store basically across the street from where we meet. But we get out right at lunchtime, and I don’t handle hunger well, so there’s always this urge to just go home and get the shopping done later. Which then doesn’t happen, and there I am at 5:00 with nothing to make for dinner. So I nudged myself to go ahead and get it done. No, I didn’t need to stop at Subway first. I had delicious leftover soup at home. Just get it done! So I did.
Here’s the quotation:
When I was a girl growing up riding horses on Army posts, I learned that no jumping horse ever really wants to jump. No matter how pedigreed he is, if possible he’ll turn aside at the last minute and let the rider go over the jump alone! So there’s a crucial moment when spurs, knees, and hands tell the horse, “You’re going to jump, and you’re going to jump now.”
So yesterday I said to myself, ‘You’re going to write, and you’re going to write now.’ Today I said, ‘You’re going grocery shopping, and you’re going to go now.’
​What nudges do you need in your life?