4-Wheel Drive

Reflection is good, until it becomes rumination. Reflection gives meaning and pauses to consider beauty and meaning. Rumination stagnates and paralyses. Reflection is productive thinking, rumination is over and over thinking.  Reflection looks back in order to move forward with improvement. Rumination causes the "wheels to spin in the mud." When my "wheels are spinning in the mud," it would be helpful to realize that this vehicle comes with "4-wheel drive." For me, the 4 wheels are probably as follows:

1. Music: I need music. Music is not so much a hobby or enjoyment for me as it is a need. "The garment of praise instead of the spirit of heaviness." For some, praise music is found in a specific genre, and to some extent I do think that there are genres that are not praiseworthy, but I believe that "every good and perfect gift is from above." There is a lot of "good" music out there, and so-called praise genres are not always spiritually edifying for me, sometimes they sound a lot like Job's friends. People that limit their genres to "Christian" probably wouldn't listen to the "Song of Songs" genre. Personally, I love anything that lifts me out of heaviness and into thankfulness.

2. Prayer: What a gift to be able to take absolutely everything to our divine benefactor and believe that we are cared for, "beyond what we could even ask or think." What a rest to be told that "all things will work together for good." ALL THINGS! I can't actually make a mistake, because when I hand it over to my God He makes it a non-mistake. The freedom that we are able to live in is a gift we can share with everyone around us, forgive them, pray for them. Sometimes, most of the time, forgiveness and suffering are holding hands. "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted." Don't over think suffering. Forgive, be soft, be compassionate, be broken, rest under the wings of the One who teaches the birds of the fields to build their nests, the One who clothes the lilies, the One who likes to count the stars, the hairs on your head, and the sands on the shore. My God is a savant, some may think of God as an idiot savant, but I don't, I think that God is the savant of idiots, able to make any idiot eternally useful.

3. Necessity: Some days my thoughts can run on and on limited only by the hours in the day, and necessity. I often think of Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus, as examples of love and duty. Perhaps the lesson is that duty should not trump those for whom we are dutiful. Perhaps duty should be embraced as a tool for reflection, rather than despised as an interruption from spinning thoughts. Any way that we focus on necessity isn't going to change the fact that there are things to do that are necessary, but seeing those things as reflective is helpful for me.


4. Love: The crux of every matter. Perhaps love is more than a wheel, perhaps love is also the vehicle and the road and the destination and the sunrise and the sunset and the air we breathe and the breathe of life and the hope that is the reason of the Ages, perhaps without love there is nothing except "darkness over the face of the deep."