Breaking out of the Box

 Photo taken by and used with the permission of my dear friend Becky Strahle of Farmgirl Paints.

Sometimes I feel a little like a mailbox: chock-full, and mostly with junk. I feel crammed with sales pitches, useless information, fluff. I feel depressed by the news. And I wonder: if it's true that what goes in must come out, is anyone extracting anything of value from me?

I take a good, hard look at what I've been offering, lately, and recognize as much garbage in my outgoing as in my incoming: sales pitches (not so much related to products as to theories), useless information, fluff, depressing news.

I fall into despair, of course. (That's pretty much always my first reaction to the hard truth: especially when I'm the one telling it.)

I have no idea what to do, initially, but I study my problem, and I pick and poke at it until my better self starts to speak...or until God in me starts to speak; I can't always tell the difference right away, or ever. I think about Eustace Conway and how--while he's not God, certainly--he's onto something, when it comes to boxes. (Google it.)


And I'm not a box. I'm neither a mailbox nor any other sort of box. I'm a real, live woman (although I'm still more comfortable saying "girl," and, at 38, am I really mature enough to be people's mother? But I digress.), and I have a God-given brain. I get to choose what I watch on tv, and I get to choose what I read, which is where it gets tricky...

because--if you're at all immersed in the blogosphere, you know--as surely as blogging involves writing, it involves reading. If you want someone to read what you're writing, you need to read what (s)he's writing. In theory. But--while I've formed some amazing friendships in the past 1.5 years of blogging--the fact of the matter is: many of the bloggers I enjoy most haven't added my blog to their rolls...or even visited my blog (so far as I know), at all.

And you know what? That's ok. They're still my favorite bloggers.

So it comes to me: I'm free. If I'm in a box, I've put myself in it. I can choose to spend more time outside; to spend more quality time with my children; to make the Bible (as opposed to what everyone's saying about it) my primary source of information; to borrow and purchase actual books, and gasp! read them; and to pray diligently over the words I write, also for each and every person who chooses my words over so many others.

And I think I will. Starting today, I will. There's a whole, unboxed circular world out there, and I'm going to choose to walk into its sunset a little more often.

Photo by Becky Strahle