My husband had a seizure yesterday morning. Long story short, he has brain cancer that, despite having had the tumor removed almost two years ago and having gone through radiation and chemo, will never go into remission (he also had testicular cancer, but that one was pretty easy to deal with). Was it stress from work? Not enough sleep since we’ve been getting up at the crack of dawn for the last two weeks to seek the Lord together? Everything piling on due to our upcoming move (his third and my fifth in the last 3 years)? We likely won’t ever know. What we do know, though, is that his body and mind and soul need rest.
All that to say, he snoozed this morning while I still got up to spend time with God. Today’s verse of the day was Revelation 3:20.
Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear My voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.
Revelation 3:20, NLT
If you look further up the chapter, you can see Jesus is talking to the church in this verse. I’ve always thought it was a wide-reaching-net kind of a thing. That whoever you are, Jesus is knocking at the door to your heart. Realizing that no, in this verse Jesus is asking to be let into hearts that already profess to follow Him is sobering. So are the words, “if you hear My voice.” If.
A common phrase in my quiet time the last couple years has been, “Cut the noise. Follow My voice.”
Cut the noise. Follow My voice.
Yesterday and today were filled with lots of noise. Cam had an MRI yesterday that had been on the books since the last one 3 months ago. Pretty great timing to have your first seizure in over a year the same day you’re already booked for an MRI, huh? Still incredibly stressful. When Cam and I got married I knew I was signing up (and happily so!) to accompany him to a myriad of nerve-wracking doctors’ appointments and sit through seemingly-endless scans, but actually sitting in the chair waiting for the love of your life to get unhooked from machines and come back to you is quite a different beast once it’s out of the theoretical realm. For the record, I’d marry him again in a heartbeat if given the chance. We often joke that, while we’ll get to hang out for eternity, he’ll probably get there before I do (despite the fact that I called dibs on leaving this earth first, and we honor dibs in this family).
I kept calm by listening to an online course on how to increase your strawberry yield (a necessity when 1. you’re about to move onto 3+ acres and 2. your kids are obsessed with strawberries, which they insist on adorably calling “double-grapes,” the name my oldest gave them many moons ago before I entered the picture) and getting some work done. I did what I always do and drowned out the stress with noise. Lots of it.
As a result, this morning’s verse of the day was a relevant one. The thought of missing Jesus’ voice and the peace He brings because I was too busy trying to foolishly and fruitlessly handle my stress myself is chilling.
Normally I like to put some thought and intention into the questions I ask God during my listening time, but I didn’t have it in me this morning, so I went with a simple, “Father, what do you want me to know today?”
Simplify your focus. You can’t be effective when you’re stretched so thin. Focus.
He then sent me off to actually do something about it.
How to Narrow Your Focus
There are a million ways to brain-dump, mind-map, get your thoughts on paper, etc. In case you need a starting point, though, here’s what I did:
I’ve been using Obsidian to organize my notes lately so I opened a kanban board and labeled them as follows:
- Brain Dump
- Needs My Focus Now
- Later
- When I Have Time
- WAY Down the Road
- Pretty Much Never
and finally,
- Rachel You Are Fully Borrowing Trouble
From there, I tried to get every single thing taking up space in my brain out there into the “Brain Dump” board. Once that was done, I dragged each item to the board on which it belonged, ordering them according to urgency and how soon they’d need my effort.
Here’s what ended up on my “Needs My Focus Now” board:
The goal from here is to, when a thought tries to take root, measure it against the priorities here. If it’s not on this list, it doesn’t get my attention.
We’ll see how it goes. Having this in my toolbox alongside a couple 4-7-8 breaths here and there should help me keep the noise levels down so I can hear Jesus’ voice.
How do you cut the noise?
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