Award Flu

I have not signed into or written on my blog for months.  Honestly, I found myself paralyzed by the blog awards.  It may seem silly, but what I found flattering and uplifting, I simultaneously allowed to confine and enslave me.

Not uncommon in my life, once other things clamoring for my attention filled my time, I found it easy to neglect blogging.  What had so recently been a joy to engage in, was now a weight.  Though I wanted to make time for it, I likewise wanted to avoid it.  The months went by and before I knew what had happened, blogging was but an afterthought, something I would read and respond to rather than a personal venture of my own.  How did the kindness of an award turn into a burden?

When I received my first award, I was touched that someone might think enough of what I had shared of myself to affirm me.  I followed the award reqs and I felt encouraged as was intended.  Then, as is almost routine among bloggers because everyone is about supporting other bloggers in their craft, more awards continued to come.  I appreciated the acknowledgement.  Wanting to honor those who had honored me by following through with what was expected in the awards, I found my strong sense of fulfilling my obligations shackling me and I couldn't break free.

The blogging community is about empowering others to write by providing tools and incentives to do just that.  The awards are one of those vehicles by which we can be a support staff to each other.  In no way do I want to impugn the giving of blogging awards.  Rather it was my response I hope to discourage in others.  I let self-imposed expectations inhibit me from doing something through which I found satisfaction.  I put up my own unnecessary road blocks.  Initially getting and responding to the awards was fun for me, but soon it became a trap for me.  I felt this cloud hanging over me.  I needed to let it rain my responses, I thought, before I could write anything else.  Pretty soon I didn't want to write anymore.

I tripped myself up by not letting go of something I didn't need to hold onto.  It is a real lesson for me personally in more than just blogging.  I like to say, "Get over yourself.  Get out of your own way,"  and here I was very much in my own way, not knowing how to move.

I just have to admit that fulfilling the requirements of the awards, as fun as they are, has got to be a secondary concern for me or award flu might set in again.  Better to get over myself and get on my way to delighting in living.

Recreation in Christian Meditation

A to Z Challenge:  R is for Recreate in Rest

Recreation has come to mean having fun, often if not usually actively, and often involves vacationing with lots of activities.  It is not uncommon to need a vacation after a vacation because not much recreating has gone on, that is renewing, reviving, or restoring, in busy vacations.  

I remember an acronym for busy:

Bound

Under

Satan’s

Yolk.

We human beings are designed to need recreating rest daily in sleep, weekly from our toils, and regularly throughout the year to reconnect with who we are and detoxify from the pollution of life.  Without this kind of recreation, we become weary, worn, and warped.

So what is a better form of recreation?  Richard Foster in his book Celebration of Discipline discusses the recreating power of meditation, noting that the significant difference between Eastern meditation and Christian meditation is the difference between emptying and filling.  

Eastern meditation stresses the need to become detached from the world, emptying oneself, losing one’s individual personhood to merge with the Cosmic Mind, as one does is seeking the Nirvana, the extinction of desire and individual consciousness.  There is no personal God to be attached to.  The goal is to be free from burdens and pains of the reality of life.  Detachment is the ultimate goal.  

Christian meditation, on the other hand, goes beyond detachment to emphasize an attachment to God.  Rather than having us withdraw from the world, it redirects us to be able to deal with life.  We are not led to be ethereal to our humanity, but rather we are empowered to be more fully compassionate in our humanity.  Through communion and communication with the God who loves us and wants us to dwell in His omnipresence, we are filled with His love to be recreated for loving others. 

Jesus took time to be alone with God to be renewed, to pray, to be quiet, to rest.  I wonder what He might think of our modern version of recreating.  I am not against having rip-roaring fun.  That has its place.  However, if the only recreation we know is at the frenetic pace of busy and we don’t rest contemplatively to recreate, we lose more than we gain.  We miss out on something profoundly rejuvenating and fulfilling, a recreation we were made for, and we settle for tired, tattered, and twisted.

A to Z Challenge