Use Your Noodle!!

Sometimes I feel like I'm as unstructured as a noodle.  I have difficulty in the area of promptness, routine, predictability.  I am fairly organized, but I am also very spontaneous, with a creative spark (my Mom called it a "wild imagination").  I have trouble fitting into boxes, and I ooze all over the lines.  I have no trouble "thinking outside the box," but have trouble staying in the box!! 
Today as I was driving along early in the morning, and was very tired, I had the thought, "I am just NOT a morning person."  I know people who wake up and start the day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to go.  Then, in the early evening hours, those same people have trouble keeping their eyes open.  I feel like the opposite:  even when I am awake in the morning, I am still sluggush and slow-thinking.  If I have to sit for awhile in the morning, I fall asleep!  So I have to walk around to keep myself awake.  By late morning, I am fully awake.  Late afternoon is my peak awakeness time, my best productivity.  At any rate, as I was driving along, I decided to get something to eat at a fast-food restaurant.  The restaurant had not started cooking the items I wanted, it was too early in the day.  I was dismayed!  How dare they not get up even earlier than I did this morning, go to work, and cook me my favorite food, so that when I just happened to arrive today, it would be ready for me!  Then I realized how paradoxical that was for me to even think that.  If it was too early for me, could it simply be too early for them?  Then I realized how much like a noodle I am, unstructured and floppy.  Suddenly, I realized that I should be thinking positive thoughts about myself, instead of negative ones.  Alas, a noodle "uncooked" has plenty of structure!!  I just have to find a way to not let myself get too overcooked!  Because a noodle cooked al dente has just the right amount of firmness.  Not to crunchy, not too soggy.  Perhaps that object lesson could help me in "real life."  If I am more mindful of the pot on the stove, and not let myself get distracted, I will notice when the noodles are done, and not let them get too squooshy.  In life, if I put effort and concentration on the tasks at hand, and not get distracted by things that don't matter in the long run, perhaps I will be more successful in "coloring inside the lines."  May the L-rd above empower me by His Spirit to be held together and structured. 

 

1 Corinthians 15:58 (NASB)

⁵⁸ Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.

Colossians 1:17 (ESV)

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.