It's so strange signing into my personal TypePad account again. The last time was apparently sometime in September, though oddly enough it doesn't seem like more than a few weeks to me. But here I am, two months closer to my wedding, two months closer to the launch of SocialSpark, and right in the middle of my favorite time of the year in Florida (when it drops below 50°… at night). What happened to the time??
Most of my memories looking back at the last two months have the din of my MacBook Pro's buoyant keys under my fingers in the background (meaning that mostly, they are memories of work). Other stuff happened — the future in-laws met my parents, I watched an antique car catch on fire, wore jeans to a four-star restaurant, and finally picked my bridesmaid's dresses. Oh! And I got a really cool lunch box.
It's been really really hard on my mind, my spiritual life, and my relationship life to maintain the pace the entire dev team had to keep up during the weeks and months leading up to PostieCon. It's always hard when I don't have all of myself to give to the people closest to me. The ironic thing is how easy it can be when I don't have all of myself to give to God.
I have a really hard time getting up in the morning so I use the most annoying tactics I can think of to motivate me to get out of bed. The latest tactic has been static. I wake up to static so loud it'll make your ears bleed. It seriously makes my hair stand on end even when I'm in the shower and hear the second round go off.
That's the kind of static I've felt in my spiritual life since I last wrote. Part long hours and part just-the-way-my-mind-won't-shut-up, it drowns out the urgings of the Spirit to where I can talk to God all day long, but have a terrible time hearing anything back from Him.
Like my alarm clock, it's a static I can sleep right through.
My mind does this really annoying thing when it's faced with a problem of any magnitude. It sits and spins like that little plastic rainbow1, trying to come to a resolution that can't be broken, and then it breaks it. So I've been sitting here thinking on this a while and keep thinking about this little blue book I read exactly a year ago on the spiritual disciplines.
Sometimes prayer isn't enough to break through the noise. The resolution I came to is much simpler in principle than "pray more." Here's a shocker: Silence gets rid of the noise. Meditation, study, and more intense prayer — literal silent time. So along with chipping away at a very cool project this weekend I'll be prioritizing quiet time, for the first time in weeks.
I sat down to write a completely different post — one about our church search and the philosophical debate that went on in my head during the sermon at the last church we visited. But this one wound up being for me… There are some things too precious to let slip away no matter how important the static is.
1 Mac users, you know what I'm talking about.