Processing

You may recall that one of my New Year's resolutions was to be me - to discover and embrace the person God created me to be.

I've been thinking about this a lot, letting God define me and reading a book on the topic, The Me I Want to Be by John Ortberg. All this got me thinking about how I process things best: by writing about them. (So now you get why I blog so much!) I even had a reading assignment in college where I asked the professor if I could submit a paper about my readings (which wasn't assigned), because I knew that without writing or discussion, the information would go straight out of my mind.

And then I started thinking about all my complaints about sermons, and how it's pretty unlikely that I am going to find a church that has interactive learning rather than passive listening in services. But that there is something I can do about this...based on the way I process.

So I bought a journal last week for use in church. Not to take bullet pointed notes and regurgitate what the pastor is saying in written form. Rather, the purpose is to take notes about my responses to the sermon. How does it challenge me? What does it make me think about? For instance, this week the pastor talked asked what we consider to be a good life. So I made a list of what I seek for a "good life." And I wrote that if we want to hire this prospective pastor we should give him a rose like on The Bachelor. That seemed important. And I wrote a challenge for myself to apply the sermon.

So, that's what I'm doing to help myself grow more from listening to sermons instead of letting it all slip out of my mind in a couple of hours.