Soul Food - Part One

Sometimes, I'm just out of whack.  When I feel frazzled, I have to stop and take a step backwards, survey the situation and see what has caused my world to be atilt.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I can point to a singular self-induced starting point.  In fact, so often is this the case that I'm coming to the point in my life I can just skip the backwards step and know straight up what my problem is.

I've done it again.

I fall into this very bad habit of paying tons of attention to the temporal things in my life while neglecting the eternal.  I remember to lay out my clothes the night before and spend enough time in the morning to look presentable...and pretty much without fail...but then it happens.  I've gotten caught up in the mundane and have forgotten the profound.  Again.  

And then I wonder why the world seems overwhelming.

My soul is not demanding.  In fact, that is probably the reason why it gets put aside from time to time.  There are far more *urgent* calls on my energies, so it is not hard to understand why my soul gets treated like a second class citizen, but boy oh boy...when it does, things start to fall apart.

Our souls are the eternal life force within us that call out for a connection with our Creator.  Our souls see the beauty (in fact, they long for beauty), they reach beyond the moment to eternity, and they are the link between us in the present and us in the forever.  Our souls need to be lovingly cared for and nurtured, because when we neglect them, we lose our God-connection and our wings are clipped and instead of being able to soar, we're earthbound, stuck in ourselves.

When my soul begins to protest from lack of attention, my first inclination is to stick her back in the crib, shut the door, and let her cry it out.  I'll show her a thing or two about longing for more - she's nothing more than a faithless whiner.  The enemy of my soul says, "it's all about believing the truth - and putting feeling before fact is for fickle pansies.  It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not - it's the truth that matters.  So buck up."  The enemy wants my faith to be soul-less, connected like a computer to its power source by a cable.  The enemy wants me to believe a better cable is all I need.  That kind of connection may be enough for my mind, which feeds on data, but it just doesn't satisfy my soul.

My soul needs more.

My soul needs more because this is the way God created me - with a body, a mind, AND a soul.  When my prayers feel like they are going nowhere, when I wonder if God is really still out there...somewhere...when I start to look for a place to go - anywhere would be better than here, I know my starving soul is crying out for help.  For nourishment.  For soul food.

To be continued...