I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel like Jason Bourne when I wake up in the morning.
Not in the super macho professional killer kind of way but in that I wake up and don’t know who I am. Strange things can happen in between the time that I lay my head down at night and when I wake up in the morning, and there is no telling who I will be when my alarm clock interrupts my nightly peace. I really have been trying to figure out what happens to me while I sleep for some time and have not come to any conclusive verdict. All I know is that sometimes I wake up super excited about life and other times I wake up and grumble all the way to the coffee pot.
I swear I don’t go to bed grumpy but there must be angry bedtime elves that pick a random night of the week to come and crawl on my face while I’m sleeping and smack me until I start dreaming angry thoughts. Or perhaps inside of my brain is the set of Wheel of Fortune and Pat Sajac is nightly telling his nocturnal neurological contestants to spin the great wheel of emotions in my head and whatever they land on is how I get to feel in the morning. I blame angry elves and Pat Sajac for my mood swings.
The reality is that there are a million things that could affect the way we wake up in the morning: we could accidently fall asleep in an uncomfortable position, sleep through an alarm, or have a dream that felt so real it confused us. Then when we wake up we find our self stepping on a Leggo on the way to the bathroom, getting a colder shower than we had hoped, and finding out someone ate all of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch but left the empty box for our torment. We call it “waking up on the wrong side of the bed,” like the physical hemispheres of a mattress really have a whole lot to do with our psychological make-up.
I can’t believe how many times I have let all of these million things actually determine the kind of day that I am going to have. I am usually pretty even natured but that still does not change the fact that sometimes I am happy and sometimes I am grumpy. One day life is great, the next day it stinks.
It is on those days that I have to remind myself that I have the power to be in complete control of everything I feel. Every emotion is a choice, and seeing as how no doctor has ever diagnosed me with anything that would say otherwise, I get to decide how every day is going to look for the rest of my life. Every day is a decision. We as Humanity have caught this idea that all of our emotions and feelings are all accidental. We think that love is something we can “fall” into and being mad is something that can just happen to us. Like all of those angry bedtime elves and Pat Sajac actually have a right to determine the course of our life. No emotion or feeling is accidental; we have to give permission to everything in our head. Nobody has ever fallen in love like it was an open man-hole in the sidewalk. Love is something we have to decide to jump into and we have to make a conscious decision to jump into that kind of love everyday with the people God has put in our lives. Anger is not something that people get, it is something they choose to allow take over their actions.
Now I think writing a whole blog post about getting a grip on your feelings would be a little bit of a waste of time and not to mention slightly emasculating. But I think I might be doing it anyway.
There are too many people who wake up every day and let the day tell them what it is going to be like. Some days they have faith that God is about to do everything He said He would and some days they feel like He is nowhere to be found. Some days they are super motivated to do everything God could ever ask them to do and other days they hate the fact that they have to get out of bed.
What changes? Is it the effect of sleep on the human body? Is it God? Is it me?
I have no idea what causes some days to be good and other days to be bad but I want to be the one who decides which is which. I refuse to let a rough morning make me miserable and distracted from all the things God is doing around me. We want to live by the whole “Carpe-Diem-Seize-the-Day” philosophy so long as it remains a cute little phrase and not something we do at 6 in the morning.
There is much debate as to when the most spiritual time of day is that all good Christians should have their “quiet time.” There is a very common idea going around that in order to be truly spiritual you have to schedule in your fifteen minutes with God before breakfast. This raises a whole lot of objections from those night owls who are like “Hey now, I read eighteen chapters of my Bible at 1:45 every night and have great time with God. Don’t hate because I can’t think straight before noon.”
Now I don’t know you or your hormones but the only way I have been able to be consistent in who I am on a daily basis is to have consistent, quality, time with God and choosing either morning or night did not do it fo rme. If you want to get off a wishy-washy roller coaster of emotion, book-end every day sitting in the presence of the One who created you. Wake up ten minutes earlier and go to bed ten minutes later. Intentionally schedule time to simply exist with no to-do list, worry, or responsibility running through your head. You are the only one who gets to decide who you will be every day and if you let the day tell you how it is going to go you are risking becoming someone you never wanted to be. Ask God about His plans for the day before you go about living it on your own.
Decide what side of the head you are going to wake up on today.
Not in the super macho professional killer kind of way but in that I wake up and don’t know who I am. Strange things can happen in between the time that I lay my head down at night and when I wake up in the morning, and there is no telling who I will be when my alarm clock interrupts my nightly peace. I really have been trying to figure out what happens to me while I sleep for some time and have not come to any conclusive verdict. All I know is that sometimes I wake up super excited about life and other times I wake up and grumble all the way to the coffee pot.
I swear I don’t go to bed grumpy but there must be angry bedtime elves that pick a random night of the week to come and crawl on my face while I’m sleeping and smack me until I start dreaming angry thoughts. Or perhaps inside of my brain is the set of Wheel of Fortune and Pat Sajac is nightly telling his nocturnal neurological contestants to spin the great wheel of emotions in my head and whatever they land on is how I get to feel in the morning. I blame angry elves and Pat Sajac for my mood swings.
The reality is that there are a million things that could affect the way we wake up in the morning: we could accidently fall asleep in an uncomfortable position, sleep through an alarm, or have a dream that felt so real it confused us. Then when we wake up we find our self stepping on a Leggo on the way to the bathroom, getting a colder shower than we had hoped, and finding out someone ate all of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch but left the empty box for our torment. We call it “waking up on the wrong side of the bed,” like the physical hemispheres of a mattress really have a whole lot to do with our psychological make-up.
I can’t believe how many times I have let all of these million things actually determine the kind of day that I am going to have. I am usually pretty even natured but that still does not change the fact that sometimes I am happy and sometimes I am grumpy. One day life is great, the next day it stinks.
It is on those days that I have to remind myself that I have the power to be in complete control of everything I feel. Every emotion is a choice, and seeing as how no doctor has ever diagnosed me with anything that would say otherwise, I get to decide how every day is going to look for the rest of my life. Every day is a decision. We as Humanity have caught this idea that all of our emotions and feelings are all accidental. We think that love is something we can “fall” into and being mad is something that can just happen to us. Like all of those angry bedtime elves and Pat Sajac actually have a right to determine the course of our life. No emotion or feeling is accidental; we have to give permission to everything in our head. Nobody has ever fallen in love like it was an open man-hole in the sidewalk. Love is something we have to decide to jump into and we have to make a conscious decision to jump into that kind of love everyday with the people God has put in our lives. Anger is not something that people get, it is something they choose to allow take over their actions.
Now I think writing a whole blog post about getting a grip on your feelings would be a little bit of a waste of time and not to mention slightly emasculating. But I think I might be doing it anyway.
There are too many people who wake up every day and let the day tell them what it is going to be like. Some days they have faith that God is about to do everything He said He would and some days they feel like He is nowhere to be found. Some days they are super motivated to do everything God could ever ask them to do and other days they hate the fact that they have to get out of bed.
What changes? Is it the effect of sleep on the human body? Is it God? Is it me?
I have no idea what causes some days to be good and other days to be bad but I want to be the one who decides which is which. I refuse to let a rough morning make me miserable and distracted from all the things God is doing around me. We want to live by the whole “Carpe-Diem-Seize-the-Day” philosophy so long as it remains a cute little phrase and not something we do at 6 in the morning.
There is much debate as to when the most spiritual time of day is that all good Christians should have their “quiet time.” There is a very common idea going around that in order to be truly spiritual you have to schedule in your fifteen minutes with God before breakfast. This raises a whole lot of objections from those night owls who are like “Hey now, I read eighteen chapters of my Bible at 1:45 every night and have great time with God. Don’t hate because I can’t think straight before noon.”
Now I don’t know you or your hormones but the only way I have been able to be consistent in who I am on a daily basis is to have consistent, quality, time with God and choosing either morning or night did not do it fo rme. If you want to get off a wishy-washy roller coaster of emotion, book-end every day sitting in the presence of the One who created you. Wake up ten minutes earlier and go to bed ten minutes later. Intentionally schedule time to simply exist with no to-do list, worry, or responsibility running through your head. You are the only one who gets to decide who you will be every day and if you let the day tell you how it is going to go you are risking becoming someone you never wanted to be. Ask God about His plans for the day before you go about living it on your own.
Decide what side of the head you are going to wake up on today.
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