Monday Morning Confessional

Last updated on: March 10, 2014 at 10:33 am by Tim Suttle

Monday Morning Confessional 2014-03-10T10:33:12-06:00 Tim Suttle

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I confess that I messed up daylight savings time yesterday. This isn’t the first time for me. This twice-yearly one hour shift always has just a little bit more at stake when you are in ministry, because Sunday is a work day. I don’t remember ever having a problem with it until about four years ago when my wife bought me a new alarm clock. This clock was nothing special, but it came with a daylight savings feature that I did not know about because I never read the directions. So I set my clock forward and hour. Then my clock automatically set itself forward another hour and woke me up at 4:30am instead of 5:30. The clocks in the kitchen were changed the night before, giving me my first clue that something had gone wrong. Then I looked at my cellphone, which had not yet reset it’s time for the switch. So depending upon which clock you were looking at, it was either 4:30, 5:30, or 6:30 am. That’s a lot to suss out at that time of the day.

Ever since then I’ve let the clock do its thing, and I’ve just trusted that it would work. And it has. Until yesterday, when it totally let me down and didn’t make the automatic shift for daylight savings. It’s my own fault. I got cocky about my fancy ($5) clock. It’s strange how disorienting it is to actually think about time. I take time for granted. When I have to actually consider hours and shifting and how that works I get all confused – especially when this is happening between four and six in the morning as it did yesterday. So I got to work at 7am, a full hour later than I had planned. I was an hour behind all day until bedtime… which came pretty early for me last night.

I confess that Rebecca Solnit did my soul some real good last week. I was preaching on the temptation in the wilderness, and the first chapter of A Field Guide for Getting Lost was exactly what I needed. I confess that I read the first chapter three times before I felt like I could move on. I think the last time I read something that I felt like I needed to immediately read and re-read was Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm.

I confess that my Lenten fasts this year were designed to mess with my productivity sickness. That’s what I call the part of my personality which obsessively works to prove my worthiness. I was trying to short circuit this in two ways. First by not finishing my meals. I would eat to the last bit or two and just leave them there. It is just one task that I could leave unfinished to see how that would bother me. When I remembered to do it, it was so unsatisfying. The problem was that I kept forgetting & finishing my meal. That’s a hard one to remember, so I’ve just let it go. The other fast is that I do my normal morning routine of family, food, prayers, and so on, but when I sit down to actually start in on work I stop for ten minutes. I turn on some music and do nothing. My only rule is that I can’t be the least bit productive. It’s excruciating… easily one of the most difficult fasts I’ve done in quite some time. The difficulty tells me that I’ve still got a long way to go in terms of learning how to subvert the idea that my self worth comes from what I produce.

I started into True Detective last week; holy cow its good. I’m only on episode four, so if you are excited about the finale last night, don’t tell me. I’m planning to binge watch this week and catch up.

I confess that I am not preaching this week. I confess that I love to preach, and think it is a gift to get to do this on a regular basis. However, I can’t help feeling a little bit lighter on weeks when I don’t have to prep a sermon. This week I still have to prep a bit for the following week, but it feels good to know I have a week off.

I confess that I’m 2/3’s of the way done with the final substantive edit for Shrink. I worked on it quite a bit last week. I confess that I was quite relieved when I sat down on Monday with my red pen and the manuscript. I had not read anything for more than a month, so I had gotten a bit of distance from it. When I started in, I was actually enjoying what I had written. It felt really good just to read through the manuscript and think that I’d like to read a book like this. I sure hope others feel the same way. My deadline is a week from today. I am hopeful that I’ll meet it.

I confess that I’m pretty bummed that Dale Jr. ran out of gas with 1/2 a lap to go while leading the NASCAR race yesterday. That’s a really tough beat. I love it when he wins because he gets really excited & you get to see the real Junior come out.

Okay friends, that’s my confession for today. Surely you’ve got something you need to get off your chest:

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