Tuesday, January 15, 2013

QuitCHIR #7... Attitude Checks and Balances...

I spent a lot of time at the coffee shop yesterday. I had my pre-work hour long shift, went to work, and then worked a closing shift for someone who needed me to. 

It was a full day. On top of that, I had an article I had to write/finish with a deadline of this morning. 

Stress was part of the day. Plenty of stress, self-imposed. I've had a month to work on the article, and I did, for the most part. The article involves reading a book, and coming up with recipes that dovetail with the book for book club meetings. So, I used lots of brain cells trying to get this all done.  I finished trying out the recipes this weekend and they were typed in, tweaked and ready to go. However, the article itself needed writing. I wanted the extra shift at the coffee shop and work-work was still a large pile of things that needed to be done. 

So I chose to have a good attitude, and to let the details fall into place, and just do what I could to the best of my ability to do it. I also chose to pray about those details, because frankly, I need all the help I can get.

And. At eleven o'clock at night I was in bed with all the things done I needed to get done. 

And I managed to have some pretty meaningful conversations throughout the day. Had I chosen to stress about my to-do list I'm afraid it would have been an entirely different scenario altogether. My conversations would have been peppered with self-defeat, anxious thoughts, and probably lots of spinning tires with no forward motion

Do you have a looming burden? Have you prayed about it? Can you take one step at a time and whittle away until it seems less threatening? Maybe spending a peaceful hour at a coffee shop or discussing things over with a someone is what you need.