I know! It’s been…well it’s been a heck of a week. Yes yes I missed my “Monday” schedule…and
Tuesday…and Wednesday however it’s not for the same reasons. This time it’s been completely work related.
So let’s talk about gardens.
Now last week I quoted Father Mark from OLMC and his veritable catch
phrase “If we’re a jerk at home, we’re a jerk.”
I followed that up with stating “So stop being a jerk.”
I realize that’s a very blanket response to a problem that’s
probably deeply rooted which is why I wanted to talk about gardens. See what I did there? My wife did and she’ll probably throw
something at me for the pun. Totally
worth it.
Our souls, our personalities, our lives, our little nuggets
of the world are, basically gardens.
They grow what we let grow there.
What we plant in our lives take root and become something larger. So how do we fix this “jerk” garden? First we have to take out all the garbage,
all the weeds, all the detrimental bugs and so forth. We’re going to need a new planting area, new
dirt. So what’s causing us to be jerks,
what are the weeds?
They are probably our focus on the wrong things, addictions
if you will. People have addictive
personalities, whether we like to admit it or not. Addictions aren’t limited to drugs or alcohol;
they are anything that pulls us away from the important things in life. Food can be an addiction, sex, pornography,
even collecting specific items or even just the act of spending money can be an
addiction. Basically addiction is
anything that sets off pleasure centers in our brains, giving us fleeting
moments of pleasure without offering sustainable joy.
Those are our weeds and they need to be pulled. The first step in pulling them is
acknowledging that they are in fact there, that we have these problems and that
we need to address them. We pull them by
talking to our priests, our counselors, our families and friends, whoever can
help us. It’s going to be a long, dirty,
unpleasant process but the end result will give us something we haven’t had in
a while.
A place to plant the good things, the things that will offer
us sustainable joy. We start by laying
down new soil through prayer. We turn our
attention to the things we want in our lives, the things that are actually important,
family, children, life goals, and we pray about them. If we have trouble with prayer, we should
reach out to our fellow Christians, those we think have it all together. They will be happy to help us learn how to
talk to God about our new goals, our new focuses.
Then we take action.
Reading the Bible, we use Christ’s love for us as a guideline for our
love for each other. This is the hardest
part, from what I can tell, because it’s so intangible. We, as human beings, like tangible things,
things we can see, that we can hold and we can look back on. But this is retraining our brain, our hearts,
and our souls, things we can’t physically touch. Here is what I would recommend, a
journal. No, wait for it, just hear me
out.
Keep a written journal, you can usually find them in the
stationary aisle at your local “something” mart. As you go through your day to day routines,
and you find yourself in situations where you are struggling, write that moment
down, and pray on it. Then, you kick it
up a notch. We all have problems, and I
promise you the people in your little circle, your nugget of the world, are
dealing with personal issues that you probably know about. Write them down in your journal, and pray for
them. Even if someone isn’t having a
problem, maybe they’re having a great deal of success, write it down and thank
God for their good fortune. When you
become cognizant of the problems of others, when you thank God for the
blessings of others, you start retraining your brain from the egocentric person
that you used to be, egocentric meaning “self-centered” and you start becoming
the exocentric person God wants you to be, meaning you place others as a
central priority.
Then you start to understand the nature of Christ.
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