Holy nudges

I don't know what the term is, and I have a feeling "holy nudges" isn't the exact term I'm looking for, but it's got to be close.

See, every once in a while I think, "you know, I should really email/text/call/visit/send a card to [fill in the blank]."  And...  I don't always do it.  Then next thing I know, they're reaching out to me, telling me they've been thinking about me.

We probably all do this (at least, I hope so, otherwise now I'll just feel awkwardly like I'm the only heathen amongst us).  I call them holy nudges rather than "passing thoughts" because it seems like time and time again, the Lord gives me the chance to be the one to reach out first, and then BAM, I've been putting it off and the other person reaches out to me.  It's like the Lord is letting me know that we're thinking about each other and He'd be happy for me if I could be the one to reach out first if only I were paying attention.

That happens a lot.  And I'm not saying every "passing thought" is a holy nudge, but I will say that when my city took out an annoying traffic light near my house I thought I really should send a little thank-you note to the city because it was really so nice that it was gone and then I got lazy and didn't send a card and then they put the light back in because they thought nobody cared (also, they thought it was dangerous).  Now, I'm not saying they would have kept it just because I wrote them a note, but I'm saying it would have been nice if I'd written them a note, and I'm pretty sure the Lord wanted me to see tangibly that when something or someone comes to mind it wouldn't be that hard to reach out, and perhaps we would even end up making a difference.

But in this increasingly lazy-fied world, it's hard.  I mean, I don't even know where I would have sent the note to the city.  And sometimes I want to send a card but it's like, "ugh, who knows how to find their address, anyhow" and then I just justify it by saying it's too hard.  Or (my personal favorite) I decide there's no way to get in touch with them except via facebook and facebook is so impersonal anyhow that there's no way I should feel obligated to send a facebook message.  And, of course, what that means is I can count on getting a facebook message from them and yes, it's always personal and meaningful and yes I feel convicted.

Oh, guys.  I have so far to go.

Reach

1 Corinthians 12 talks a lot about working together as the body of Christ, and at the end it talks about different positions and abilities that some of the members of the church there in Corinth had. Then, at the end of the chapter, it says, "covet earnestly the best gifts." It segues into chapter 13 (the love chapter, cue the sappy wedding music), but I've always sort of wondered about that last part. I've heard it discussed several times, that we should seek to do our best for the Lord, etc. (I'm sure I'm getting this all wrong, pardon my potential doctrinal errors), but I think it's a funny way of wording it, if you will, that we should covet the best gifts.

I've always sort of been that girl who wonders what she should do with her life. I always wonder if what I'm doing is all I should be doing. I feel strongly that I should be occupying until the Lord comes (it's been a while since I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to the Lord coming. So allow me to say it again: WOOHOO!!), but there don't seem to be specific guidelines in the Bible about what we're supposed to be doing.

I know that whatever my hand finds to do, I'm supposed to do it heartily, as unto the Lord. Sadly, this seems to include work. (Dear work, I don't seem to want to work heartily. Sigh.) I know I'm supposed to be living my life in such a manner that even under a microscope, people won't have something bad to say about Christians (yeah....), and that above all, I should keep Christ as my goal.

So, back to this whole "whatever my hand finds to do" thing. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd love to really make the effort to reach out and do more. I'd love to cheer more people's days (I smile at people on the freeway on my way to work every morning. It might sound stalkerly, but people seem pleasantly surprised to see some very-clearly-singing-with-the-radio girl turn and give them a big ol' grin at 70 miles an hour), I'd love to be able to deepen my friendships (there are some people I've been "friends" with for years but am only now really getting to truly know them. You know who you are!), and reach out and make new friendships (I have a pen pal!! It was the most random pen-pal happening ever, that started with a random letter to a summer camp and a crudely-drawn family tree that bonded my new friend and I) (PS if you know other people who like to email and/or write letters (I hope to keep postal workers everywhere with enough work so that snail mail won't even have the option to die. Take that, email) then let me know, seriously, because, in case you haven't noticed, I love to write!) (also, I love parentheses. I have used too many today. Perhaps I should give up parentheses as my New Year's Resolution?) (Nah).

That was a long paragraph.

So anyhow, I just feel like as a Christian I can be doing more. More to encourage those that don't have the Light of Life living in their hearts, and more with other members of the Body of Christ. After all, the Lord is coming very soon. We might as well do the most with the time we have!

PS (or PPS? I guess I already used a PS in my post. Then again, can it really be a post script in the middle?) I clearly have had too much sugar today. There is no way a person without outside influence would be using such great quantities of parentheses. Or short sentences. La, la, la. Maybe I'll go hum, or dance a jig. Just kidding, I can't jig. (did anyone else ever think that Jiggy Nye, the bad-ish guy from the American Girl series Felicity, was a weird name? I did.) Or dance. Or stop writing, apparently. Maybe it's time to go bombard my friends with another round of long emails. Clearly I have a lot to say. =)

L8r

I'm really bad at using all that slang-type stuff while emailing. I always figured that it was just because I have a whole qwerty keyboard available with all the letters and it wasn't that hard to type words out in their entirety, you know? There are some words I shorten, but in general, I'd rather type a cheerful, "Later!" than "haha lol l8r" in an email.

So when I got a cell phone I thought that since I was finally closer technology-wise to my peers, perhaps I would magically start typing like them. But it's not easy to remember to shorten words, and sometimes I'll be texting and remember halfway through a word that there's a shorter way of putting it, so I'll delete what I wrote and use the shorter version. By that point, of course, enough time has been wasted that I might as well have just used the word I was trying to type in the first place.

It makes me feel like perhaps I missed out on the gene most people my age have, the one that lets you do stuff like that. And I'm not perfect--I'm a terrible speller, and sometimes say things like "bother" instead of "brother," but that short-hand computer language just isn't something I'm good at.

What I am good at? At least mildly so? Riding a bike and texting. Try it sometime, it's harder than it looks!

Left and right

My sister forwarded me an email recently that had a bunch of brain tricks and optical illusions. Most of them were ones I'd seen before--counting all the fs in a sentence, catching all the "thes" in a sentence, seeing the old lady and the young lady, that sort of thing--but there was one in the email that I hadn't seen before. It was a video clip of a not-very-clothed lady spinning in a circle. The way you saw her turn determined which side of the brain you were using. (For a refresher course in which side does what, check this out.)

As most people who know me can attest, I don't have the best left-and-right skills. It took me a while to decide which hand was making a legitimate "L,"and then I realized that I was seeing this dancer spinning to the left. The description said that if you saw the lady spinning left, you were left-brained, and if you saw her spinning right, you were right-brained. If you could see her spinning both ways, your IQ was 160 or above. Well, I just couldn't imagine that I was left-brained at all, so I had to call my family to confirm that I had the correct left.

They came, and, once I explained my dilemma, they confirmed that I had, indeed, gotten my left correct. My brother saw the lady turning right, and my dad could see her switch back and forth at random. My mom also saw the lady turning to the right.

But as I looked, I realized that I saw the lady switching back and forth as well! Then my brother followed, though my mom could still only see her turning to the right. By this point I was curious (I've never taken an IQ test, and don't actually know what's considered high, but 160 just sounds a lot higher then my IQ should be) as to what brained I really was. So I pulled up a bunch of tests online and my brother and I took them, and found some fairly surprising results. For one thing, I have extremely high left-brainedness. I'm pretty much completely middle-brained, which means I have almost equal strengths on both sides, but I still am stronger in my right brain than my left (though not my much, which was where my surprise lay). As for my brother, he has stronger right-brain dominance than I! For those of you who know my brother and I, one might assume me to be the more right-brained among us, and he the left-brained. But apparently, assumptions are often wrong.

Of course, these tests are generic tests, potentially faulty. I might be completely right-brained after all, but I answer left-brainedly. Who even knows.

With age comes... boringness

While reading through old diaries of mine the other day I realized that I am boring these days. I mean, legitimately not interesting. My diaries used to be hilarious. My emailing habits were laugh-inducing, at the very least, while maybe not hilarious, per se. For instance, I was looking through emails the other day and came across this email (this is only a fragment of an email, we used to email lengthy missives to one another multiple times a day) that I wrote to friend mrg. This was from April 2006, should any of you wonder how long ago it was that I used to be funny. How I wish I understood why I stopped...

"It snowed 2 nights ago, did I tell you? Freezing cold. As in Jo-could-almost-see-her-

breath-inside-the-house cold. I hate sitting through breakfast when it's cold. Partly because sitting through breakfast means that I'm awake, partly because breakfast implies that it's morning, partly because I hate all mornings, and partly because I'm not huge into cold. Just thought you should know.

"Ahh, I miss those old mad scientists. Do you ever wonder what would happen if a bunch of crazy Einsteins just kinda jumped out of nowhere and started talking? Talking about anything, really, because they talk so funny. Sometimes I have to wonder. Those crazy geeky-type people: do they realize that they're not normal? I mean, really, do they understand that there is a world or "normal people" (should the rest of us in the world be considered normal, which, looking just at the example of you and I, is quite unlikely, but compared to the Einstein guys we seem normal enough) that they just don't fit into.

"Good grief, am I still talking? I honestly have no idea where that came from. I have no idea why I started talking at all. Oh man, I think I need a nap. I hope you're faring better then I, because I think my condition is deteriorating. Do I have a condition? I hope so. Conditions seem fun. Fun in that very I'm-most-likely-going-to-die kind of way, but hey, that could be fun. OK, yeah, I really do have to go."

I guess that's not that funny, but I can't even tell you the last time I wondered about Einsteins jumping around and talking. In fact, that was likely the last time. I don't entirely miss those days, I think my brain wires were criss-crossed and somehow they've gotten somewhat untangled, which is why I'm old and boring now. I just miss that I had the ability to say words like that.

Though why I wanted a condition, I'm really not sure. Though if you died from something, huzzah, you'd be in Heaven!