9(nine) hours: An Adventure through Shuffle

Time completely alone is such a uniquely fabulous thing.

There have not been many times,recently, that I am completely alone with my thoughts for a prolonged amount of time. I think that that's for a reason though. I don't need complete prolonged solitude very often. I'm a write/talk(rarely) out my thoughts and inklings, then share kind of person. I do enjoy good long conversations, those are on my top 10 favorite things list. But I think God designed prolonged solitude for reflection, or at least that's what this drive was for me.

Shuffle (in terms of an iPod) is such an interesting phenomena in my life. Doubly so on this particular drive from Dallas to Fayettville, and Fayettville to Arkadelphia. I didn't even think a lot during it. In fact there was maybe 3 minutes of silence the entire time. I was more led through thought processes by my 2.6 day, 933 song, long playlist I'd carefully constructed for this undertaking. It was like there was a train of music trudging through all these experiences and ponderings I've been harboring in my head the past months or so. This train would pick up a thought here, a possibility there, and would keep on trudging through different songs/stations and drop off these"passengers" in a different/new area of thought, and things just began to click. Some songs provoked a more spiritually provoking "passenger" to get on the train, and it would sit down and talk to another passenger who might be a simple emotion or an observation I've been neglecting to process. Before I knew it, a lot of inputs my heart and head have been processing for a long time, became outputs at last. Solidified, fixed, and encoded, for the most part.

I've been trying to tag stages of my life with words lately. Mostly, just for fun, but also for some much needed introspection. The word I came up with after this Train ride in my car was this:

Free.

I can't express how surprised I was to discover this adjective. The thing is, it's noun form (freedom, for those of you not following), was not what came to mind. (I have not seen fit to say I am experiencing freedom, because I have recently decided that I do not have freedom, as I am, or strive to be, a slave to Christ.) I am feeling free in every aspect of the word.

For some reason God has chosen these past two moths or so for me to be broken before Him, and because of Him, alone. I've been going through this healing time a bit blindly, and whenever I decided I was better, Father would knock me back down and shake his head, saying "You're not done healing until I say so. And you won't be done until you do it my way, ye of little faith." So, that's been the story of my heart: Trial and error. Lots of trials, and many errors have led me to now, the end before the beginning. This beginning is me seeing how endlessly helpless I am without Christ, and acting this realization out as best I can. I've never been that (past tense feels good) broken inside and out in my life, and I am a huge believer in Father using brokenness to draw us to himself, and this time has been no exception. I didn't resist his drawing, but I just came a little slower than He would've liked, I think. I prayed that I would be desperate for Him and boy did he answer. Desperation galore. Someone wise once told me that the "desperate prayer" is one of the most dangerous prayers you can pray, and I prayed before praying it, and it's what I needed.

I don't have an adjective for this new stage yet, because it just opened up this past week/weekend, but I'll let you know when I find it. Until then, this train of thought will be loading and unloading for a while, I hope. I only got through 276 songs, so I've got about 700 songs of thinking left to do.

But hey, how many roads, right?

P.S. Cold weather makes me sit and think a lot, as well. Get your scarves and gloves ready. :)