On the Way

When Paul was flattened by a light and a voice on the road to Damascus, he listened. And in that moment, the world changed.

Do we have a moment to stop, look and listen?

This is the question I hear people around me chastising themselves with regularly. I really “should” find time to …. exercise, eat right, play with the kids, finish that manuscript (ahem), call my parents, volunteer, visit relatives, pray … And then there is Nike, so very helpfully, telling us “Just Do It.”  But we don’t and we don’t like this about ourselves, which spins us down into the ‘don’t like’ cycle.

This is why I love the Kinesthetic approach. (I think Paul was a Kinesthetic Jew.) He was, in fact, on the way to just doing it when that voice got his attention. He wasn’t knelt in prayer or fasting or attending a service, he was on the move.

And that’s how I see us even now. Moving, albeit at warp speed. Frankly, if I stop, I get dizzy watching everyone else whiz by. Then I’m tempted to run and catch up. But that’s where I go wrong. Acceleration sets me spinning. What I need is to keep the same speed. To coast, as it were. To do and be about my doing at God’s pace, but keeping an eye and an ear out for God-speak. For that light and that voice.

Stopping gets me all unraveled. Then I have to build up momentum again. Moving, especially moving along a familiar road – driving my kid to school, running the neighborhood, sketching in my journal, walking the dog, shooting hoops, hitting putts or range balls, even eating lunch all by myself at the table – all these things engage the rest of me so my eyes and ears and those wonderful inner circuits can have a conversation.

I never know what I’ll discover there, but it’s always enlightening. It changes me.

Coincidentally, I am just completing my listening to an online course on marketing. I have never been trained in these principles. It’s no wonder that Fit2Finish (my small business) has remained small and unknown, given my ignorance. The final lecture discusses ways to appeal to your market. One way is the personal appeal called the testimonial. It is used in cases when “consumption is uncertain,” it says, when you can’t know whether the product works until you try it. The “Try this because look what it’s done for me!” appeal.

Funny, I guess I have been a marketing major all along. Thanks for joining me along the way.