Making a change

I've been thinking on and off the last couple months about making changes. It started when I got my car washed on New Year's Eve. This is something I usually do only when I get an oil change, but after driving to and from Nebraska, the car needed it BIG time. So I had it cleaned inside and out. Everytime I do this, I'm always so happy with how my car looks (it's black again!) and ask myself, "Why did I let this go so long?" and committ to not letting it get so bad next time.

You don't want to see what she looks like right now.

A week or so after New Years I decided to finally get internet at home, but first gave my computer an upgrade by adding more memory because it'd been running pretty slow for the last 6 months. My friend (whose husband installed it for me) told me that my computer went from Payless to Prada as a result and she was right. I was amazed at well it worked! I had gotten so used to it being slower and slower that I didn't really think about trying to make it faster; that was just the way things were and I would deal with it.

A friend of mine is struggling through some marriage problems and one of the things that's come up every time we talk about it is just how long it's going to take to make everything right again between them. They're committed to working things out but are realizing that it's not going to happen overnight because the problems they have didn't come about that way either.

I was listening to a podcast last night about change and the example was used with weight gain and loss that was so true of my experience. I didn't put on an extra 85 pounds in a couple months; it happened gradually over a few years, and then when I did lose it, it was a few pounds at a time over the course of another year. And it wasn't until I looked back at pictures of myself from my heaviest time and compare that to now that I realized how much I let myself go, but it happened so subtlely at the time.

This week especially my community helped me recognize that I was slowing slipping down a new slide of dangerous thoughts and actions. It's been their accountability and the Word that's kept me from from letting my heart go like I have to my car, computer, body in the past.

Colossians 3:16 "Let the Word of God dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom..."