Rebooting Life

I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Nehemiah 13:19

The other day I turned on the dishwasher at the church so that, after a meeting, we could quickly wash our dishes and leave. Unfortunately, the machine gave me an error code when I turned it on. I didn’t have the manual, so I couldn’t decipher the message on a for-sure basis, but knew I would have to call the repair service to either talk me through it, or schedule an appointment for them to come fix it.

There was a time in my life I would have gotten peeved or bent out of shape over that sort of thing, but these days they mostly roll off my back like water off the back of the proverbial duck. And why not? I’m mostly quackers anyway.

The point is that life has its challenges big and small, and there’s no use wasting energy on things over which we have no control. If I’m tempted to get upset, I just pull the Serenity Prayer out of my spiritual knapsack and offer my prayer to God: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That prayer is and has been a life-saver. I can’t keep a machine from breaking down, but I can call for repair. I can’t control the cost of the repair, but I can find and hit the device’s reset button (if it has one) before I make the call. I can’t tell the repair man or woman what to do to effect the repair (since I have no knowledge or expertise in the matter), but I can stand by and hand them tools if that helps, or my silence (if that speeds them up).

There are worse things in life than having a dishwasher that doesn’t work. Of course, I say that as a man who prefers to hand wash dishes. On the other hand, if the microwave were to break down, now THAT would be catastrophic!

Still, it’s important to keep things in perspective. The hardest part of the serenity prayer is that “wisdom to know the difference” part.

Wisdom seems to be in especially short supply these days. I think it’s because we don’t do enough reflecting as a culture. We’re really into the insanity of the instantaneous.

We want everything, and we want it now. I am not immune to that, of course. When I get up in the morning, the very first thing I do is grab a cup of yesterday’s coffee and nuke it so I’ve got something to drink while the fresh pot is brewing. There is an unwritten rule in our house; the best way to approach me before my first cup of coffee is summed up in one word: DON’T!

Reflection takes time. It requires stopping to think, ponder, and cogitate.

When our children were young, we would sometimes play Hide-and-go-seek. We’d tell them they had thirty seconds or a minute to go hide, and then we’d say, “Go!”

At the word “Go” they would start spinning like whirling dervishes trying to figure where to run off to. That was adrenaline doing the spinning. When the adrenaline hits the bloodstream, blood rushes to the large muscles (legs and arms) as part of the Fight-or-Flight reflex. When blood rushes to the muscles, it is taken from the frontal lobe of the brain. That’s why people who panic do such stupid things.

Now, when one is jumped by a grizzly bear or a T-Rex, that adrenaline rush is a good thing. But when it comes to solving problems, it can be a bad thing, because it can result in scrambled thinking or “spinning our wheels.” So, unless one is faced with a life or death crisis, it pays to slow down, stop, take a cleansing breath to give our blood a large draught of oxygen, and think.

I pray that 2017 will be a year we reflect more and respond less; pause more and whirl less; breathe more and bleed less. May this be a year God helps us to reboot our lives, regain our sanity, and reset the dishwasher of our minds for Wisdom’s sake in this, our valley.