At the Center of It All

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on getting my work life under control. Teaching in three buildings means that, for one thing, something I need is frequently not where I am. It’s also a significant challenge keeping track of all the various things I need to take care of, since in many cases I can only work on certain things when I’m in a particular school.

I began reading a book that has been on my list for a while: Getting Things Done, by David Allen. Within a week, I have already begun to change my habits and routines at work, gathering all of my “stuff” into one place, figuring out the most efficient way of storing and maintaining it, and how to keep track of my projects and to-dos in a way that will work despite being in a different place every day.

It struck me as I reflected on the last week how easily my mindset and routine started to shift into new patterns. This is hardly an established habit yet, but I can already see changes in my thinking and the way I see many of the things that come across my desk at school. It’s even starting to seep into my activities at home.

So why is it so hard for me to establish new patterns in my spiritual life? Why when I start a new habit of daily prayer and Bible reading does it only last a few days before drifting back to nearly non-existent? I think it’s because, like all of the prior “organization systems” I’ve tried to use, these habits were simply laid down on top of the rest of my life. Nothing fundamentally changed inside me—I simply tried to add a new system or routine to the existing ones.

Our small group has been going through The Truth Project. Its tagline is “Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?” One of the things I think I believe is that I want to get to know God and grow more like Christ every day. But do I really believe that this is really something that can happen, or do I just say it because it’s what good Christians say? I think perhaps my failure to make this habit work is because I’ve been trying to fit it into my life instead of rethinking my life and building it around a relationship with God.

Photo Credits: Reading scriptures by Amanda Bills Photography, 5/17/07