Close Your Eyes.

Often, these days, we hear the phrase, "open your eyes!". It's often a charge from a very radical person. It could be religious or political or just general. I will even admit to have been this person before. "Open your eyes to everything amazing around you!", haha. And while it's cheesy, I still agree with it.

However, with what little experience I have, I have learned that simply opening your eyes and looking around is not the first step to digesting everything around you. If opening your eyes is the first step, it can turn out to be a disaster.

For me, I know that to be happy, I can't just do the things that I "know" will make me happy, I have to do the things in front of me. I have to complete the day's opportunities to the fullest. That's when I'm most happy. That in itself, in our culture, seems backwards. Why? Because everything is so instantly attainable.

I'm going to roll up my thought again before I get too far off point. Ha.

Lately I've been taking 20-30 minutes per day, in the middle of the day, to re-assess what is going on in my mind. You can call is meditation, reflection, or even just good planning. On my lunch break at work I walk 2 minutes down the road next the grocery and sit under a tree on the hill there. At my job we stand all 8 hrs of our shift, so on lunch it's common do simply go in the back room and sit at a desk for the 30 minutes. But I feel so pent in by doing this in the past, and can't do it any longer. So I've started going to to that tree on a hill. I'll take my shoes and socks off and lay back with my hands behind my head and sky-gaze for about ten minutes. Then I purposefully close my eyes for about 20 minutes. I do this because it's healthy for the eyes, they can gain energy through being closed. But I also do it because it allows me some time to turn over my thoughts, my worries, my mood, and I can iron out wrinkles in the fabric.

There is breeze and there is grass. Extremely underrated stuff!

But when I open my eyes and stare back at the world around me, it feels better. I walk back to work and it's a little easier to be nice to grumpy customers. My mind feels a little greener for lasting the rest of the day.

In every way I've found it to be helpful. It's extremely healthy, physically, spiritually, and mentally. And what's more important than those three things?

I guess my point is very simple, even though I have a lot of obscure thought surrounding it.

I've been closing my eyes, and it's working wonders.

In that moment she realized that try to plan a future would be impossible. Too many others would affect and taint anything that she began for herself. It was the most depressing realization that she'd ever encountered.

But when I leave I want to go out like Elijah
With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire
And when I look back on the stars
It'll be like a candlelight in Central Park
And it won't break my heart to say goodbye

I'm on this big Rich Mullins kick:

So this father, this really nice, gentle looking man who has all the answers – he's the father figure, a real Ronald Reagan type – and he says, "Son, if you see what you want, you gotta go out there and get it!"

Have you ever heard that? Anyone ever tell you that? Have you ever told anyone that? You know, "when you see what you want, you've just got to go get it."

This is a remarkable thing. And this isn't peculiar only to our culture. Pretty much across the board people think this in a lot of ways. And you know what? The more we pursue what we think we want, the more it eludes us. Or we get what we think we want, and we find out we didn't really want it in the first place. Everything that we go after will disappoint us.

I don't think there's a whole lot of advantage of being terrifically assertive. I know very few people who are my age (and I'm, say, edging ever so slightly toward 40) and I know a lot of people older than me–'cause there are, for those college kids [in the audience], people older than 40. I've met a few. Very few of them ever found any real satisfaction in accomplishing anything. It's an amazing, remarkable thing. Most people's satisfaction comes not from what they've accomplished. I love the John Lennon quote where he says, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." I think, "Wow! That is exactly true."

We think that we're going to find happiness because we see something happiness is supposedly contained in and we go for it and we get it and we all live happily ever after. But that's not the way life works out. Even our own experiences tell us that. And yet we continue to be tolerant of the view of life that says nothing is more important in the world than that you get what you want.

That is why there's so much hurt in the world, because there are too many fathers that have decided that their kids cannot stand in the way, that they're going out and finding themselves. So they abandon their kids and they go out to find out who they really are. Twenty years later when their kids have grown up and don't know them, 20 years later when they've been through a couple more marriages with a couple younger women that were really not all that satisfying, when they're about 60 years old, they realize the folly of their thinking. They realize what a ridiculously stupid thing it was.

We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us – and this is remarkable – the Scriptures teach us to be submissive.

This is not a popular idea.

Spoken my Rich.