Is Your Life Out of Synch?

This morning I was very frustrated. My phone and computer calendars have not been in synch since my return from Australia. I have spent the morning rescheduling appointments and grumbling. My mood was not improved by the fact that my body clock is still out of synch too. As I look out on a wet Seattle morning with the snow turning to slush, I think longingly of the 85F days I left behind in Australia less than a week ago.

Then I read Andy Wade’s great article Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again? That’s the problem I realized. Not only has my phone been on constantly since my return but my life has been too. Catching up after almost three weeks away takes a lot of time and effort and it is easy not to take the time to refresh and resynch my life. Taking time to breathe in deeply the fragrance of God’s love. Relishing the joy of being back with our dog Bonnie who is once more full of life. Drinking in the beauty of a winter shrouded landscape. These are the things that resynch my life, the things that make me feel I have switched off and switched on again.

For Andy Sabbath is a discipline that reboots his system. Lent is too. I appreciated his reminder of this. It is easy for me to focus on what I am encouraging others to do for Lent and not enter fully into the season myself. Andy explains:

It used to be that Lent was more of a private journey for me. But over the years I’ve begun to appreciate how important it is to walk this journey together. You see, it turns out we’re not a bunch of individual computers that can simply be turned off and on again. There’s something embedded in our humanness that causes us to quickly revert back to the old operating system with all its old viruses and bugs. It turns out that we need to walk this journey together because others can see what we fail to see… refuse to see… that all we really did was turn the system off and on again, but nothing actually changed. (Read the article here)

So what does this look like for you? Although Lent is still a month away, here at Mustard Seed Associates we’re already preparing. I’m looking forward to our Return to Our Senses in Lent retreat. I am also looking forward to exploring together as a team A Journey Into Wholeness and to reflecting on the blog series with posts from many collaborators around the world. This is always an important season of reflection for me, but I definitely needed this reminder today that I need a spiritual reboot. And in case you are wondering all I needed to do to resynch my phone and computer calendars was to switch the phone off and on again.

How do you conduct a spiritual re-boot?