NOTE TO SELF.

We live in a noisy culture.

Yes, there's regular NOISE noise-- the shouting/ringing/talking/electronic/whatever hullabaloo, but I'm starting to think that the psycho-social implications of living in today's cultural climate-- whether we're grounded in the spiritual or not-- create a kind of noise in our own heads.

It comes to us in the guise of our own inner voice, and it's the one that tells us what we can't do rather than what we can. Even if we've identified the path we're supposed to be on and are attempting to use our gifts accordingly, this voice slips in and under and around our best efforts to distort and conceal and destroy. It happens to many people I know, and it certainly happens to me.

Here's the thing, though. You know how you can fall intensely in love with a song, and you play it all the time, and it comes on the radio and you're like "AHHHH THIS IS MY JAM" and then suddenly you're so sick of it you never want to listen to it again, so you pretty much don't? And how it's not hard NOT to listen to it, because you don't love it and it's not doing anything for you so of course, why the heck wouldn't you move on? And so you do. You just turn the knob.

This is actually a learned response. You learn at some point that you have some control over your environment, and that you can turn things off, and this is especially clear to me because Eva hasn't quite figured it out yet. If a toy that makes noise keeps making noise when she wants it to stop, she freaks out and tells me that it "worries her" and is all for having me turn it off, EVEN WHEN SHE KNOWS HOW. And it's not just willfulness or laziness-- she gets anxious and focused on the noise and can't make herself make it stop. I can generally remind her that she can turn it off and that works, and then we laugh, but it's not automatic for her yet.


Oh dear God...run.

So back to that voice, then. The other day I was spending an uncomfortable half hour or so listening to The Greatest Hits of My Own Insecure B.S. playing in my head, and I suddenly remembered reading this in Ephesians (and bear with Paul, who is a wordy, short little dude):

"But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift...for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ..."
--taken from Ephesians 7-15

Paul had his own reasons for addressing the church of Ephesus this way, I am sure, but here's what I'm getting at:

Life is hard enough without self-imposed limitations. How much better of a steward can I be to the gifts the Lord has given me-- be they butchering, baking, or candlestick making-- if I just turn the knob and ditch the B.S.? I sometimes walk around with my own personal rain cloud without realizing that I AM MAKING IT RAIN. I am, in a sense, being childish-- being tossed to and fro and blown about-- when I allow so much of my energy and potential and God-given excellence to be absorbed by a craptastic emo song that I don't want to listen to anyway. (Ugh, emo-- who would?)

And here's my other connection to this passage in Ephesians: If I really take this to heart, and turn off some of the noise I put there myself, and focus more on God's will for my life, it feels like another solid step towards maturity. I wrote once about something being a really chewy, solid lesson on the way to growing up, and I THINK THIS MIGHT BE ANOTHER ONE. NOTE TO SELF.

Here's something I've learned from parenting my children: it can be hard to do something just because it's for their own good, but if they think it makes them more of a "big girl" or "big boy," they'll embrace it readily. And damn it, I will, too. I like to think I'm one more step on my way towards being that crazy, all-knowing caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland with his hookah and little mushroom domain. Who doesn't want that? Maturity is currency with me, I'll admit it.


Grow up in every way, baby. Like really do it. You're short.

So this turning off the self-imposed noise-- the deep-sixing of this insecure chatter-- I should do it because it's good for me, because I'm sick and tired of that song, and because it will help me to mature in and into Christ.

NOTE, again, TO SELF. Take your own advice.