Oops and Order

Oops!

Is it possible that at 7am here, it is still November 9 somewhere else?

I completely forgot to do anything here yesterday

I remember in college hearing Mike Cope say something in a sermon that has stuck with me these 20 or so years. Note that this is not the only thing he said that stayed with me--there were also more profound things.

In this case, I don't even remember what the point of the sermon was. I just remember that on his way to the point, he said something like, "You know how you have certain ways of doing things, and you have to do those things in a certain order? And if that order gets messed up somehow, it just doesn't feel right, and you feel kind of messed up the rest of the day?" He related it to a toothbrushing routine, as I recall.

What I remember vividly is that when I heard that, I thought, "No. No, I'm not like that. I have almost no order to the way I do things. I used to, but coming to college and living in the dorm changed everything, and I lost my abilitly to do things in order." I even began to wonder if something might be wrong with me!

Well, now I know that order is important in ways I couldn't have guessed back then. One of my main emphases in working with severely depressed people or people with bipolar disorder, is to help get order and routine back into their lives. There's even a name for this and a book about it.

Our memories lean heavily on order and routine. Our biorhythms depend on the steadfastness of light and dark, and eating at more or less the same times each 24-hour period.

And my life has not had much order or routine since January, when I lost my job with Christ Community. I've done what I can to create routine for myself, but without the pegs of similarity among days, I haven't been terribly successful. And when each day is different from the others, and there is not even a lot of similarity from week to week, it just makes it even harder when plans that I have been counting on and framing my thinking around, get changed at the last minute, as happened with three planned events yesterday.

So, congratulations to me for surviving this rather chaotic time period. I'm not gonna worry too much about missing a blog post.

And maybe another time I'll share about the things Mike Cope said that he may have actually hoped would stay in his listeners' minds!