We Heart It
I mentioned yesterday in my Wine & Love post that I’d experienced what I thought was complacency settling into my body, and the reverberations of mother and child beating against the walls of my mind. I was mulling around my kitchen as I brainstormed this post thinking back on Tuesday when I skipped class.
I remembered reading something somewhere about listening to God and getting to know Him before trying to talk to Him, or something along those lines. Well, I’ve been doing this completely wrong, I thought. I treat my relationship with God the way I treat my relationships with other people and vice versa. My cousin, Em, has often complained, and with good reason, that I do not listen to anything she says. I would just like to point out that’s not entirely true, but it is to an extent. My problem with listening is the part that comes after hearing information being passed to my ears – retaining. My mother would call this selective hearing, and blame my father for having given it to me. But as I am one who is trying not to blame my parents for all my faults, I’d like to think I can get past this bad habit.
Every time I sit down to spend time with God, I’m usually talking. I do very little meditating, praying, and listening. Our relationship is a one-way street. I go down it, and I hardly ever go back for answers. I basically vomit everything out into the air, and leave it at that. As I mulled around my kitchen last Thursday brainstorming this post and simultaneously waiting for my cup of tea to heat up, it occurred to me that my relationships with the people in my life would not change until my relationship with God changed. If I wanted to fix the way I functioned in a relationship with friends, family, and acquaintances, I had to go to the main relationship in my life, or what should be the main relationship in my life – the one I have, or should have, with God.
There are a lot of factors that go into a relationship, but the two most important ones I’ve come across are ones that I’ve gotten from the Bible: 1) slow to speak, quick to listen, and 2) slow to anger. The reason why I have bad relationships with certain people in my life is because they’ve been too quick to get angry and accusatory, which leads to lots of talking (sometimes yelling) and little listening. I never had a good example of what it means to have a functional, successful relationship with God. I’ve read things and have had people tell me things, but I’ve never actually seen it, and something that I’ve learned about myself in the last few years is that if I can’t learn it visually, I eventually have to figure it out for myself.
I can be a very complicated academic. You can’t just tell me something and expect me to understand. I have to get nuanced details – I have to read and research and study. In other words, I have to over-analyze. This could be why Em always complains about me not listening, because I’m not the kind of person who is good at hearing something once and remembering it with certainty. If I can read it or see it, I’m better at retaining the information, so it’s a magnificent thing that someone decided to compile a massive documentation of The Everything You Need to Know About God and Life handbook, also known as The Bible. However, reading the Bible is only one aspect of my relationship with God, and it’s an aspect I don’t even practice regularly (although, I really should get better at that – it’s one thing to say, “I can’t read Harry Potter as much as I want now because of school, but to say, “I can’t read the Bible like I need to because of class work?,” um…no). Another important aspect, aside from praying, is just sitting and listening, something I don’t do – like, ever. Like I said, I vomit everything out into the air, and walk away.
I used to pray all the time. I feel like I used to be so much closer to God. I used to journal regularly and just take life slow. It’s true what they say about growing up – it just gets faster and faster, until you’re 50 and you’re thinking, “Holy man, where’d my life go?” I took for granted the time I had left, free of bills and work and all the implications of being an adult. I don’t want to be 50 and feel like my life has passed me by without hardly a glance out the window, but that’s pretty much the life I’ve created for myself at the moment. I have very little time to breathe during the day. I go to class, I go to work, I go back to class, I go home, I get ready for bed, and in between all that, I do homework and of course, write blog posts (something I’ve resolved not to even consider giving up again).
The other day, I told myself, “You have to figure out a way to get through the day without feeling so buried in your mind. It’s all a matter of mentality, and right now, yours is problematic.” That was the mother in me talking. Yet the child, as always, was resilient. She recoiled, twisting my frame of mind into a tight, cramped spiral.
Essentially, I know where the answer lies. But, like the mother in me said, my mentality is problematic and proving very difficult to maneuver around. Perhaps, though, it’s the maneuvering that is the problem. That’s like the medicine a doctor gave me once for my migraines. It did nothing to actually stop the episodes, it merely took care of the discomfort. I need something that ostracizes the childishness. I need to be still, despite the thought that complacency may have been curling up inside my resolve last week. Maybe that’s not what it was. Maybe I needed that morning away from routine to be able to write this post and figure out that what I really needed to do was listen.
