Reflection Days

So every Wednesday I get a reflection day. On this day, I don't have to go to work. I'm still required to get up for prayer in the morning, but then I have all day to relax, reflect, and just be. It's really nice, but man is it hard to fill a whole day with relaxation.

Sounds crazy, but try it sometime.

Spending a full day from about 7am until 6pm in quiet reflection isn't easy at first. It's honestly hard not to curl up in bed after breakfast and sleep until a more (at least for me!) acceptable time. But! I am being broken of my night owl tendencies pretty quickly. It's about 9:40 right now, and I could have gone to bed at 8:30 and really not thought twice about it.

But here I am, blogging to my faithful readers :)

I gotta say, it's a little weird to adjust to at first, but spending a day reflecting is such a great thing. It's really rejuvenating, in a way that simple sleep alone can't compare to. As we've been told, these days are meant to restore our minds, our bodies and our spirits. Sleeping might restore my body, but my mind and spirit would miss out on a lot of good things.

Every week I'm given a Psalm to read and pray on. I pick out something, a phrase or even a single word that grabs me. "What is God saying to me today?" and it's a really nice way to not just read Scripture, but to wholly ingest it. I make it my own by reflecting on what exactly it says to me. It's really pretty cool.

Beyond that, we've been assigned some books to read on defining the self, and becoming who you are meant to be. I've always found it hard to do that, especially when I'm so young and have a lot of experiences ahead of me.

But then, in my reading yesterday I stumbled across this: "God desires for us to be the person we were created to be: to be simply and purely ourselves and in this state to love God and let ourselves be loved by God."

And that's who I'm trying to find, through all this work, prayer, reflection. But putting it that way, and thinking on it as I have for the last couple of weeks, I don't have to dig that far. It's not about redefining who I think I am, or who I think I'm supposed to be. It's just realizing that I'm exactly who God intends me to be.

Nothing sounds more beautiful than that.