Battles in Planning

I have not written a blog post in almost exactly 3 years. It feels like a narcissistic hobby, but I wanted to write a post today in the hopes that I help someone who has felt hopeless as a planner like myself.

Let me launch first by saying that I am a terrible, awful planner. I am a wonderful maker of to-do lists, and thoughts swim through my head all the time. I am terrible at "confronting" my day. It's hard to articulate the "why" of how I dread each day in the morning - nothing particularly bad will or is going to happen, but it's as though I cannot let go of today because I have some hatred for tomorrow. I'm not suicidal. I just feel like I don't know what I'm looking forward to.

This got me to thinking - Why do I dread tomorrows? I go and do fun things and I enjoy my life at many moments, but it's like while one part of life is humming along happily, there is a low-level current dread of existing under it. So I began the process of working through the answer to the question of Why do I dread tomorrow? Why am I not looking forward to another day?

A few things about me - I am a messy person and it has gotten worse (only recently better through this process); I have a million ideas and I can't pick one I like best; I feel melancholic and ecstatic many moments at a time - I can go from one to the other instantaneously, one is not harder to move to or from than the other; I feel like my life is both radically out of control and sometimes manageable and sufficiently in control (I let go of the "perfectly" in control thought long ago). I'm a born again Christian. I struggle with making choices vs. things just happening and being stuck where I am. I'm conflicted because mercies are new every morning and instead, I dread every morning. I'm conflicted because my hope is in Christ but I feel hopeless. I don't know what I'm working toward - while I try to bring God glory, how am I to do that when I don't know my life's work?

When it started...
Earlier, at the end of January, early February, the stuck-ness was really clawing at me. I was struggling with purpose and direction (and still am), and plain lack of discipline because I was struggling with what the point of it was. I'm single, I don't have people over because I almost don't know how to do it, and I'm floating around out in the lake of life, aimless. Who cares about me? Does it matter? And I began praying about those isolating thoughts and notions, and I decided to ask around. I asked my pastor and my successful friend Erick for books on purpose, motivation, and discipline. The thing was, I had already bought critically acclaimed books I hadn't touched. My pastor gave me a lot of his time, though. We chatted about the melancholy and the tendency toward it verses the overpowering-soaking in it. And we prayed. I'm convinced the prayer laid the groundwork for learning to take place because I felt like I had made the first steps in articulating what I have struggled with since high school - what am I supposed to do? How do I change my thinking, my approach, my attack to get ahead from being behind? Am I chasing an illusion?

Getting around to it...
February was a blur of grading and vacation, but I had to accomplish two things before a deadline: clean my desk at school and clean my house before vacation. I was determined to be done in my classroom by the time school was out on the Friday before break, and knowing me, it was not likely to happen. Then it was the house after that. Somehow, by God's grace, I got the classroom done by 4 pm, a record for me. I have never been done that early - it was a milestone that I undertook from Wednesday to Friday. It was great leaving a clean, tidy (from the inside out - filing cabinet, cabinet, and desk innards were organized) that I know I would return to. It was then on to the house.

The house was a mess. I was so hectic for so long, that it had not had a good, deep cleaning since November. There was trash and dirty dishes and an entire Kohl's worth of dirty laundry. It also needed to be scrubbed - literally. I have dogs, and the dirt, dust, and mud left an orange-gray tinge to literally everything - the way a fire leaves soot everywhere. Time to buckle up. I tossed, I washed, I scrubbed, I wiped, I swept, I mopped, I vacuumed, I moved rugs and mountains, I did everything I had left undone for months. Mom was going to stay and, as I have Latina Mama Syndrome (LMS), you better believe it had to be spotless. And it was. Except the couches, which Latina Mama handled graciously while I was gone. She also cleaned the microwave which was my favorite part.

I ached so badly after those two days, I spent the rest of my break in Orlando wrapped in pain - feet, spine, it was intense. But I felt accomplished. I did not realize that these were called "small wins" until reading a book I picked up months ago via Kindle. It was time for a change, and this book opened my eyes.

Flickering light bulbs...
Small wins are tiny victories that have chain-reactive properties - they set you off onto a path of change upon which you can build, accepting both large and small victories as progress, taking failure and setback in stride. Small wins must be small - the book I'm reading (The Power of Habit) talks about how big, radical changes hardly stick. It is usually one small victory that acts as a catalyst to others. In reading the book, I have found what I'm doing wrong in planning and goal-setting, but more than that - it opened my eyes to my stuck-ness. It has to do with some bits of approach and some bits of execution.

The book illuminated what Ben Franklin already seemed to do inherently: change small habits rather than radically alter life. If you read Franklin's writings, he talked about keeping track of habits. So little of what he did was radically changing life. Every time I have tried to plan and change my life, it has involved some idea of radically changing things - it doesn't stick with me. And forever, I have thought this was something up with me. Wrong. It fails most of us. The book speaks about keystone habits. Something similar had happened to me when God healed me of social anxiety in 2009 - a lie I believed died that day. Like a domino, that experience touched off other events. I was healed of emotions and thoughts and underlying patterns of behavior that flowed out of the well that lie was. It was poisonous water I kept dipping into. With it gone, my entire personality changed.

And here was this book, this month, this year, telling me that this is a thing with habits.

Full-steam...
Working through the book, my brain started connecting. In theology, there is this idea of unbelief - we don't get emotionally and spiritually better because we are steeped in unbelief (this is not in reference to physiological issues, though I believe those can be healed, but not because we do/don't believe it can happen). That was anxiety for me. I didn't believe that I could work through anxiety without knowing the historical issues and experiences and narratives I wrote in my dumb head that caused me to fret so much. And I prayed for God to heal that unbelief - He did, revealing a lie I believed at the core of my being. Feeling it die like a weed that withers, thoughts in my head changed, undercurrents of worry melted, and I knew I had become different in a literal instant.

Fast forward to 2017, March. I am in the heat of grad school, county endorsement assignments, grading, teaching, and drowning. I need to read something that may give me hope. And this book illuminates why my attempts to change fail - I don't believe I can.  The book is called The Power of Habit but for me, it should be called the power of belief.

What if, like unbelief that leads me to stunted growth in my faith is akin to my belief I cannot change? For a while I had known that there was a dysfunction in my faith about choice, happening, and change. I have had more faith in sin and shortcoming than God's ability to overcome it. I have believed every effort to be in my own strength, therefore abdicating success before I even began an attempt. It did not occur to me that I should consider believing in my ability to change was not faith in myself, but trusting that God would be there to help me stop sin because I am already one with Christ. This book illuminated that it has been a form of unbelief in Christ's indwelling strength that I can change. For a long time, I was convinced that God's got to do it and in some Hollywood way I thought it would look like.

It reminded me of Jesus, whom was anticipated as the coming Messiah, but was not the form the Israelites hoped for. They were looking for a warrior king that would make a physical kingdom. They could not fathom the humble King whose aim and joy is so much greater - restored relationship with the Living God. It was out of left field.

Here I am, reading a secular book that God used to show me that I am NOT powerless, but that believing I can change is empowering because Christ has enabled me to do it. I have not believed that He has given me power by the blood to change - that we are one when I repented and accepted Him as Savior. The issue is that I have believed every attempt or desire to change has arisen through my human effort and flesh, which I have believed would fail, in which case, I have failed. Every single time. What God is showing me is that, like St. Patrick, Christ before me and Christ behind me, Christ within me and Christ is with me. I am one with Christ, and with that, there is authority I NOW have over myself to change and I ought to believe that it WILL happen by vehicle of my Christ empowered and sustaining effort. It does NOT need to be a fight against myself because I NOW BELIEVE that I can change. I no longer hold that a belief in my ability to change is an idolatry because God has put it right in its place: I MUST believe in the power of CHRIST to work change in and through me. Believing that I can change can be divorced from the idea that change is due to faith I must have in myself. Faith in myself would be idolatry, but it doesn't mean that I can't change, it means I have faith in the authority Christ has given me over my choices. THAT has changed my life, and come in a package I never expected, like Jesus himself.