The distraction of life

I the reason I wrote this blog is because the darn lady behind the counter keeps getting distracted with other customers and she won’t finish my transaction and I have so much I need to be doing and I am impatient and arrogant and in a hurry. And let’s be frank, I was here FIRST! But she is just cluelessly distracted and flits from one customer to the next; I guess thinking that she is keeping us all happy with her sometime attentions. I started thinking that most of life was just one big distraction, but there are all kinds of levels of distractions.

The first REAL distraction in life is this big one; how long it takes to live. This is a biggie, depending on where you live in the world. For instance, living in Russia took a good half of every day. Friends of ours in Africa tell us it still takes half of every day just to live, to gather food, to prepare it, to travel to work and back etc, etc. Here in Macedonia, it takes longer to live than it does in American, but less time than it did in Russia.

The second issue of the distraction of life is how much you expect to get accomplished in an hour, in a day etc, etc. The more you expect to get accomplished and how much you actually can, seems to me to be a center pin of how successful you view your cruise through life. I long ago scaled back in a very significant way, how much I expect to actually get accomplished per day on this side of the ocean. It is the only way to not scream in frustration. Today was a PERFECT example. We arrived with our Short Term Team at the church, and was told by the pastor that in 15 minutes, at the maximum, he would be ready to go to the property with us. That was doable since we had an appointment in another city at a certain time that we needed to leave toward.

One hour and 20 minutes later, we were getting under way. Ten years ago I would have been pacing and steaming. Today I sat down in a chair and promptly fell asleep. Now personally I think that was a healthy way to handle a distraction of life that is beyond my ability to control. On the other hand, the way I was feeling in the first paragraph above was fairly unhealthy. What was the difference? I think the difference between today and Saturday was perspective. It is the same thing James is talking about in chapter one, you know asking for wisdom and God giving it generously . . . and I need to ask every day and clearly there are days that I don’t remember to ask. But I need that perspective . . . to put the moment into the eternal . . . and then the proper action becomes clear.