KELSIE PETERSEN
Summer is quickly coming to an end here in what many would consider “far” north. While the days are still warm, in the upper range of our warmest daytime highs, there’s a marked difference in the “air,” and in the intensity of the sun. I notice the shade hitting parts of the yard that were previously sun-soaked for much of the day, and what feels like 36 ceiling and table fans only run during the afternoon, rather than day and night.
I’m sure I’m not alone in my wondering, “Where did summer go?” While it seems like the summer has flown by, the past seven days seem to have been packed with more summer activities than the entirety of the last two months. Boat rides and tubing at the lake, friends camping out in our driveway, VBS for the kids, summer markets, golf dates, community BBQs, and more have been on the schedule. In the midst, I was reminded that I needed to submit something for the blog this week. Apparently I only intended to add that deadline to my online calendar but had never made it a reality!
As I sat down today to write, down to the wire (as usual), I found my mind flooded with everything that has been occupying my thoughts and life for the past week or more. Concentrating felt impossible; ideas were nonexistent, and I found myself constantly pulled from my blank document to all manner of social media, DIY ideas to heat the pool so the kids can swim for a few extra weeks, my political dabblings, and everything in between. After far longer than I’d care to admit, I threw my hands in the air, grabbed my Bluetooth headphones, put on a favorite artist in my music app, left the phone at the back door, and headed out to a lounger in a sunny spot on the deck.
Before long, my hands grew restless, so I moved to my neglected tomato plants and spent the next hour, music still in my ears, staking and securing the gangly stalks.
The lyrics of the music served to focus my thoughts off the things that have admittedly consumed my mind today.
The lyrics of the music served to focus my thoughts off the things that have admittedly consumed my mind today. Because my hands were busy, I couldn’t write down some of the phrases that stuck out in my mind, but as the words embedded themselves in my heart, the chaos that I had been fighting seemed to calm. Rather than futilely trying to filter my writing ideas through the maze of my thoughts and burdens, I was able instead to filter my thoughts and burdens through the gospel lyrics that were filling my ears.
I don’t even want to think about how long I sat in front of the computer this morning, allowing my mind to race and wander as I tried to “think” of words to put on the page, and I’m a little embarrassed that it took me that long to put everything down and fix my distracted mind where it needed to be.
Fixing my focus on Jesus and tuning out the distractions are things I know, things I have “learned” many times over, yet they are the things I so often forget. I suppose it’s the human condition, and for me, to a degree, it’s a derivative of my desire for the “crock pot” life I wrote about a few weeks ago. I forget that I can fix my eyes on Jesus and run my thoughts and actions through that perspective. I feel some of Paul’s frustration from Romans 7:24, feeling the fragility of my humanity and of my propensity to forget and to allow my focus to wander! “Wretched (wo)man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death” (and distraction)!! When will I learn!? Sometimes I feel like I need some sort of 24/7 IV drip of reminders.
But thank the LORD for the verses that follow:
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you (Rom. 8:1–11).
Sometimes when I write, I feel as if I’m becoming a stuck record. So often I am drawn back to the idea of “life in the Spirit.” In Adventism, we were steeped in “life in the law.” So often, people leave Adventism and drift into “life adrift,” or “life distracted.” But life in the Spirit, as Paul describes in Romans 8, is a powerful, powerful description of true LIFE—of moments, days, weeks and years dripped through the filter of the Holy Spirit, of the finished work of Jesus on the cross, a life lived IN the gratitude and amazement of what has been done. It doesn’t mean that we spend every moment focused on nothing BUT our moments; our days and weeks are fueled by that same gratitude and amazement.
While writing, I continued to listen to music, and I was reminded of the third verse of the hymn “Come Thou Fount,” which seemed to also express the frustration I felt with distraction today.
O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
Of course, I had to go find the entire hymn and listen to it, and after listening through all three verses, I just wanted to sing the first two again, as they encompass the “and then” of my wandering and leaving of the God I love.
Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love.Here I raise mine Ebeneezer; hither by thy help I’m come;
And I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.
As I sit here, facing the deadline I am stretching to its very outer limits, thinking back on the journey the Lord has brought me through just in this day, I am awed. Driven to distraction, only He could take my frustration and my forgetfulness today and turn them into a reminder of who HE is, how life in the Spirit is the way of the believer, and how He has redeemed me through His never-ceasing streams of mercy.
Thank you, Lord, for Your grace and Your mercy to me. †
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As always, enjoy hearing your thoughts and musings in Christ and how He leads us life.
Thanks for that Celtic rendition of Come Thou Fount! Inspiring!