Brain-ache? Yeah, Me Too...

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. ~C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

Courtesy of Flickr: here

Yep, that's where I am- disentangling.

Maybe it's my love for psychology that makes me this way, but lately, I have been about the business of asking myself stretching questions. Now, I have been asking myself questions for a long time, sometimes out loud (I'm sure it's entertaining to watch). Asking myself questions is not new to me. I studied Psychology and Sociology, remember? I am, however, changing the questions I ask.

You see, the questions I have been asking myself are impossible questions to answer. In turn, I would get frustrated with my inability to answer said question, which would lead to more impossible questions. It's a vicious cycle. When I focus on stretching questions (disentangling), versus questions I can't answer, I can make needed changes.

There are things we need to work through- questions we need to lay before God. I love C.S. Lewis' quote from Mere Christianity above. He says it takes "patience" and "skill" to work through the things we have encoutered to determine our reality from other influencers in our lives. We have to "Disentangle".

I don't know about y'all, but my mind and heart get tangled a lot, making it hard to see top from bottom. Hence, the disentangling I said I was up to these days. I'm mindful of the questions I ask. I'm learning to avoid questions that are God's to answer- you know, the ones that make your head hurt with confusion. I'm focusing on growing. There are changes I've avoided in my life for quite a few years, and I'm convicted.

So, I'm asking God for discernment, wisdom, and courage to ask hard questions instead of burrying them.

To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, I will share with you one of the questions I'm asking myself.

What am I hiding behind?

Get it?

Anywho, I have one more aspect of "question asking" to touch on before I end this thing: 

Be careful not to get too caught up in asking questions. Some things are not for us to figure out, but to be lived.

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903

in Letters to a Young Poet

Need I say more?

I didn't think so.

In His Name,

Jennifer