Are You the Turtle or the Hare?

Oftentimes, I'm the hare.  I hate to say it, so I just had to come out with it fast.  :)  You know the story.  The turtle and the hare race.  The hare is fast, speeding ahead, then taking a break, speeding ahead, then getting distracted, speeding ahead, then napping.  Meanwhile, the turtle is slow, steady, plodding along at a set pace, always moving forward, gaining ground.  He finally crosses the finish line and wins.  While the hare is napping, the turtle, by way of persistent, constant forward motion, beats him.  The moral of the story?  Slow and steady wins the race.

One of my favorite decorations for
several reasons, one being that he
prophesies this lesson to me!  Isn't
he fancy?  He's from Africa.  His name
is Shaka Danso (reliable king).

The turtle is synonymous with consistency, doing a little at a time, all the time, and staying on top of things.  He's not flashy.  He's not extreme.  He's steady.  Of the two, compared in this light, he's the mascot of the Kingdom.  The hare is synonymous with irresponsibility, petulance, and flights of fancy.  That might not be a perfect description of my own character, but here's the issue.  In certain aspects of life, I find myself putting a responsibility on the back burner, often unwittingly, until it screams loudly enough that I must attend to it in a frenzied all-out sprint, forcing everything else to the wayside. 

I don't ignore the laundry on purpose.  It's not that I hate doing it, either; I actually kind of like it.  But in my busy life, I feel certain that I just did it.  While I'm tending to everything else, the laundry piles grow at an incredibly rapid rate until one day, they're looming over me and nobody has anything to wear.  But I just did it, I promise!  This problem compounds as a family grows, mind you.  Confounding is the growth rate of an infant's pile of laundry.  Multiply this times all the responsibilities in a household, and you can see how the issue compounds.

What you do not govern will govern you.  This principle is true across the board and likes to situate its La-Z-Boy most permanently in your thoughts and emotions.  Don't govern them and see if they won't control you.  But if we do govern those, our actions tend to follow suit.  Did you know you can, and should, control your thoughts and feelings?  So in my effort to become more like the turtle, I had to train my mind.  I had to become proactive like the turtle, purposefully moving forward, rather than reactive like the hare, flippantly tending to what immediately caught my attention.

Yahweh's voice is not always a great thunderclap and a boom that miraculously rearranges things.  More often, in this living relationship, His voice is a normal one or even a whisper, giving appropriately practical direction.  His direction to me?  Make a housework schedule and stick to it.  Slow and steady.  Every day perform a task or two that may or may not be shouting at you and thereby...own it.  Govern it.  Handle it.  Could it be any more obvious?!  I know most of the world operates this way, but in this area, it wasn't obvious to me until it was.  I needed revelation.

"The laundry pile can't be allowed
to speak more loudly than my God."

Now sometimes it's good to be a good sprinter.  The hare has plenty of redeeming qualities, and we don't want the pendulum to swing too far in either direction.  But when you're a good sprinter, train for a marathon, as I've been doing, or reverse that for marathon runners.  Poor hare.  His real problem wasn't that he could sprint well.  His real problem came back to what I already addressed:  his thoughts, feelings, and character.  He didn't have his eye on the finish line, on the goal.  He had no vision, no purpose.  He had nothing worth pursuing other than his own whims, nothing that transcended his own little bubble of feelings.

 Alfred prophesies, too.
Is it a piano or a typewriter?
I say both.

Isn't it relieving to know that if there's an overwhelming area in your life, you can address it, own it, govern it, handle it?  How grateful I am for the Holy Spirit who patiently helps us do just that if we're willing to apply the truth He speaks.  And the point is not some self-help program.  (Yahweh's whole point is not to make you the very best you just so you can say, "Yea, I'm great!")  The point is to make us powerful sons of God who are not moved by anything other than His voice.   

So the laundry pile can't be allowed to speak more loudly than my God.  That's just crazy!  If I must attempt to emulate a turtle for a bit to ensure it, hand me my shell and let's get to it.

Are there any distracting voices in your life that are shouting too loudly for you to hear your own thoughts, let alone God's?  You can shut them up!  (Maybe in your case, he'll tell you to be the hare [minus the attitude]!  Isn't relationship better than arbitrary rules?)  Then all you have to do is get to it, which is when you'll really need His help!