Blessings Counted? Check.

Well, I've been trying the whole "Surprise me, God" thing for a week now, and I would have to say this. First, I'm probably thinking about it incorrectly. You're not neccessarily going to get nice surprises. Second, I tend to agree with Rhett. It is sort of like asking the universe for a surprise. Well, unless you're clarvoyant, of course you're going to be surprised.

What I am discovering is that it's helping me to be a little less negative overall. This is not to say that I've been especially pleasant because I haven't been. In fact, I've been suffering from a bad case of emotional funk. This is sort of like regular funk, but rather than stinking up the house, emotional funk is a cloud of icky emotions that stinks up the astral plane.

But it could have been a much worse state of emotional funk, and it wasn't because all week, I've been re-learning how to count my blessings. I think of surprises as pleasant, even though I've had one or two unpleasant ones this week (beginning shortly after I wrote my last entry.) When I get to the end of the day, I have to think about the things that happened. This gets me thinking about all the good things that happened to me during the day to see if this or that might be the surprise. And one or two days have held some really good things, but I'm not entirely sure that those things are "the surprise."

I'm sort of the opinion that maybe the process is supposed to teach you something, and that winds up being the surprise. If that is the case, then I would say that so far, I'm seeing that I need to spend more time thinking about the good things that go on in the day. Hokey as that sounds, it's been nice to spend some time focusing in on the things that I liked about the day rather than the things I didn't like about the day. And yeah, it's becoming a little less unique, and it's starting to seem like one more thing I have to check off my get-ready-for-bed list, but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. I usually go home and try to process out how I can fix what went wrong during the day, and then I wind up stressed and cranky.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still stressed and cranky, but now I'm spending a little less time each day in that state of being, and so far, that's the surprise I've gotten from this experiment.

Trust?

I'm battling the common nuisance known as "the cold" (AKA Hell), so forgive me if this record is disjointed and strange. I plopped down in front of the TV this morning because I actually woke up when my alarm clock went off--an unprecidented and unlooked for event--which meant that I had the hour I normally reserve for snoozing to do what I would with. I turned on channel 11, and they were interviewing the guy who does their jingles. He was promoting his book Surprise Me, God, which I found rather interesting. You can check it out at his website. I'm thinking about trying this experiment myself. It could get interesting, I suppose. And Christians are supposed to have turned over the "canvas" of their lives anyway, so maybe it'd be an interesting plan.

I like to think that my real issues right now are too important to try something like this, which probably means that I don't really trust God. That's probably true. I've spent my whole "Christian" walk echoing Peter in Acts. Acts is sort of like the psychadelic trip of the Bible. I pretty much read it and think everybody was probably stoned, but at any rate, in it, these animals come down from Heaven, and God tells Peter to kill and eat. Peter responds by saying, "Surely not, Lord."

Even in the 6th grade, I resembled this verse. In everything I was ever asked or told to do, my response was always, "You can't really mean that... 'Surely not, Lord.'"

And sure, Peter was talking about eating unclean animals, which is a totally different issue (and one that, as a white American Christian, doesn't really affect me)(thankfully), but I still think it applies because I think the verse is really about trust.

I've never trusted God. To me, it's like letting go of the steering wheel when you're on the freeway and entrusting the destination of your vehicle to an invisible passenger. This passenger may have made himself known in the past by various, albeit vague, signs, but that's no reason to risk life and limb on a hunch that he may steer the car in the right direction. In fact, there's a country song out right now that suggests this very thing, and it freaks me out to no end. I can tell you one thing, if I am ever in a near accident (which I frequently am), the last thing I will consider is throwing my hands in the air and telling Jesus to "take the wheel."

So this whole, "Surprise me God" thing makes me a little nervous becuase I really do have a real crisis on my hands right now and the last thing I want is to give Him an open license to do whatever He wants. As if He couldn't anyway.

And so that's the bottom line. I don't have any control over what God does, anyway, if He does, in fact, exist, so what am I so worried about? And if He doesn't exist, then no harm, no foul. So maybe I will try this experiment. It might be a simpler way than my own meandering thoughts to see whether or not I actually do believe in Him.

I guess the bottom line about trusting God is this: Where the hell is he? It'd be so much easier to trust a passenger who I could see. (And one who didn't have all kinds of weird sub-clauses like "I-will-steer-the-car-only-if-you-have-faith" or "I-would've-steered-the-car-but-you-were-testing-me-so-I-didn't," which, blasphemy though it may be, seem to me like easy ways to explain the laws of chance.)

On the other hand, maybe I'm not even in the driver's seat at all. Maybe that's what scares me about faith in general. I may not even understand my position in the vehicle.