It’s hard to be introspective, sometimes.
Sometimes my mind seems to overflow with thoughts and words and feelings and concepts. They swirl in an endless fog, a thick one full of little intensely colored sparks that zap my consciousness one after another before zooming away into the mist. Sensory overload combined with numbness. An odd and disconcerting thing.
That’s when I get behind on my journaling.
That’s when new blog posts don’t appear for two months.
Because that sort of mental environment makes me give up on trying to take a snapshot of any one thing and really look at it. Life is too complex; I get caught up in living the big picture and feel exhausted by the mere thought of taking the time and energy to contemplate the details.
But maybe that’s when I most need to take a snapshot.
To take a good hard look at one little facet of life.
To examine its intricacies.
To fully feel what it has to offer- the delight of its joys, and maybe the sharpness of its pain. Because pain can be refining. Because experiencing joy in life brings glory to the God who created it.
To understand. To gain perspective. To see the beauty in the chaos.
To not understand. To practice trusting the Lord.
To learn.
To see.
To think. To think heavily.
Did you ever think about the fact that the word “ponder” carries with it the connotation of heaviness? I didn’t, until my choir conductor talked about it at the beginning of this year.
Ponderings are not light, airy, shallow, superficial. They are deep and real and profound. And I usually can’t feel entirely settled about anything that tugs at my mind until I’ve really thought through it- pondered it.
In choir, we talked about Psalm 101:2. It says, “I will ponder the ways of the blameless”.
The danger in the times I mentioned is this: if I don’t even want to think about my own ways, how much harder will it be to ponder the ways of God? To desire to ponder the ways of God?
Yeah. No tidy conclusion to this train of thought.
The Lord is good. Maybe I’ll just… really think about that for a minute.
