This morning, Daisy woke up at 6:28 am. She wakes up every morning at 6:28am. It's getting old. She jumps off the bed, goes to the door. She doesn't want to go out. She just hears activity in the house and gets up. I get out of bed, pick her up, and put her back on the bed. She says "oh, alright" in her little dog language, and snuggles back under the covers until I drag her out of bed an hour later. It's our own special little routine. I just wish I didn't have to see 6:28 every flippin morning.
On another note, I was reading about something I'd heard about and promptly forgotten. It was the concept of "Surprise me, God." I've been in a kind of a funk about the God thing lately, because I've been really overwhelmed with work and some other life issues, and I've been talking to Him about it a lot, and He's doing that thing where He just sits silently and observes. I know He's there, and I can almost hear Him doing that mock "...and how does that make you feel?" thing that people do when they're making fun of psychologists. I know that sounds weird, but that's kinda how my relationship with God works. He sends His Spirit to work me through it, and that's great, but this little ADHD mind just wants to know the answer so she can get on with the way she runs things.
Anywho...I read about this group that was going to wake up every morning for a month and say "Surprise me, God", and then look for ways God surprises them. Now, God surprises me delightfully every day. I just get so used to it, that I forget to look for it. So, I thought that it would be cool to do it every day for a month, and see what's up. But how am I going to remember when it started and when a month is? Oh...hey! Tomorrow is the start of a new calendar month. COOL! Thanks Spirit! (I even got a new journal recently, and was trying to figure out when to start writing in it. Looks like tomorrow's the date!)
The thing is, this month that's coming up, August, is the back to school month, and it's one of the busiest months of my life, and also one of the most stressful. I've heard God loves to take times like that and just do radical stuff with it. Anne Lamott writes in Traveling Mercies that the Dalai Lama believes that when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it's to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born, and that we have to be distracted so that it can be done. Basically, it's the thought that God sometimes needs us to get out of His way, so that He can get a few things done without our meddling and messing it up.
God told me a few months ago that I would be going through some big changes in the upcoming months, and to just suck it up because it will be great. So, though I've accepted that fact, and am looking forward to the change, I've also been waiting for it to happen and trying to figure out what it is, and what I can do about it. I have been feeling over the last few weeks that I'm in the way of it. So, I need to back off.
So, for the next month, I'm going to try to reel my life back in and just wake up every morning and say "Surprise me, God." I'm going to look for His surprises in every moment of the day. Well, maybe not every moment, but I'm gonna try. And I'm going to delight in them. That's what He tells me to do in my very favorite verse. And I'm gonna write about them. In my new journal, and here.
So, Surprise Me God!
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