Accepting our Tuesday Soul

Welcome to the fourth week of the Simply Tuesday book club! The first week we were invited to make a bench, to sit down and acknowledge our smallness. In week 2 we were encouraged to embrace our Tuesday work. Last week, we were invited to find our Tuesday people.  This week we accept our Tuesday soul.

I’m writing this on Thursday instead of Tuesday because I’m on a work trip in California. The time gets away from me when I’m on these trips! However, the long days and drives have given me ample time to reflect on what I read on the airplane, so it’s all in God’s timing.

Part 4 is titled Accepting our Tuesday Soul: More laughter. Less shame.

Chapter 10: Prayer & Questions: Making friends with the fog. This chapter resonated with me because whenever I think of prayer, I am reminded of the time a pastor articulated what I was thinking: That the act of prayer is more for us, since God already knows everything. At work we have prayer time twice a week, and I’m growing increasingly dissatisfied with the format. Someone is charged with asking for prayer requests and praises from one of our teams. They then recite the prayer requests or ask for volunteers to read them aloud. Then we take turns praying for those prayer requests. I’m thinking, even God must be bored by now! We are telling him twice what he already knows! But the value is in bringing these things before God, laying down the fears and prayers of our missionaries and big world wide problems to Someone who can actually help.

Chapter 11: Desire & Disappointment: Why Clarity is Overrated. I related to this chapter as well! Sometimes I so badly want God to just tell me what the plan is, already. But part of faith is learning to be content and live in the unknowing.

Emily says, “I’ve learned to stop trying to earn my acceptance, to release the idea of a rules-based religion. I’ve learned what it means to let go of the try-hard life. But daily, I still need to learn to let go of life. I don’t live with life that comes from me, but with the life of Christ within me.

Chapter 12: Confession & Laughter: Why lightheartedness is the truest kind of miracle. I love that in this chapter Emily talks about the value of embarrassment and shame, two things we often try to avoid but can lead to lightheartedness. She provides as an example of a hero who continues in the face of embarrassment and shame Charlie Brown. Which is kind of ironic because Charlie Brown is my favorite Halloween movie.

“We need to know how to carry on as the manager of the team even when our team keeps losing. We need to learn to trust our friends even thought he football has been pulled away more times than we can count. We need to learn that love is still an option even though the little red-headed girl doesn’t look our way,” writes Freeman. “We need to continue holding out our trick-or-treat bags even when all we get is rocks.”

[bctt tweet=”We need to continue holding our our trick or treat bags even when all we get is rocks.”]

I’m going to let that one sink in until next week, when we wrap up our book club.

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