Back on Track

This blog had just begun gathering steam, being updated several times a week, when technical difficulties brought it to a complete halt. No posts. No comments. No way of moving forward. Though technical issues remain, it is back on track.

The Bible study group I belong too - it stopped toward the end of the last semester, and several key members were away over Interim. Tonight, three weeks into the second semester, we are meeting to discuss time, topic, and reevaluate the purpose of our Bible study. It should be back on track.

My accountability group had a difficult time coordinating a time for all of us to meet due to our new schedules this spring semester. We finally met up last Monday. I think we are back on track.

Dorm Prayer has had major fluctuations in attendance. We have twelve people, and then we have two. I hope we get on track.

My devotional life, prayer life, and other disciplines - I practice them regularly, but my heart is in them only so often. I get tired, distracted, and hurried. I struggle to be obedient to God, to do what I know I ought and to avoid what I know I must. I try to view my day, my activities, my friendships, and my time in the light of who He is and not in the light of how I am. I often fail. I wish I knew how to stay on track.

I recall being CF President back in school. During our committee meetings, the discussion would invariably wander way off topic. We knew each other too well, and we had way too much fun. My voice was the voice of reason. I knew what we had to decide each meeting, and what could afford to wait. Always, I had the agenda in my mind, and when we strayed too far, I would sound the oft repeated call: "Focus, people, focus!" To this day, I just need to whipser the word "focus" with that group of people, and we laugh over old times, about how I kept us on track.

How much precious time is lost when we get off track. I am impatient to grow, to mature. I want to be making constant, or at least consistent, progress. I do not want to live with any sin a minute longer than I have too. And yet, I cannot keep focus. And then I find myself off track.

And then. I. Beat. Myself. Up.

Not that it gets me back on track any faster - it slows me down actually. Not that it makes me feel any better, except in some twisted way. You know what I speak of. I tell myself that as a follower of Christ, I have recieved the Holy Spirit and have thus been empowered to...

...to what? Be perfect? Be infailable? Be free from all personal struggles? Not to make light of failure in the Christian walk, not to make light of sin, but at what point did I decide that I was never going to go off track anymore? If that is possible, someone forgot to give me the memo.

I have been empowered to grow. To keep continuing. To get back on track, even if I have to do it seventy-seven times a day. It is a meandering course I take, but God does not seem as interested in the shortest distance between two points as He is in persistance in pursuing Him. So, I get back on track, and try to focus just a little bit longer this time.

And, who knows. Maybe someday He will even call me a man after His own heart.