Listening to God’s Voice

Purposeful Parent Tip: Your intuition is your inner GPS. Listen to it.

“You need to slow down and relax. You are doing too much. Take care of yourself,” says my BEING voice. “No time for that. Have rooms to paint, another basketball league to prepare for, Christmas is coming,“ says my DOING voice. ”Well, if you won’t do it yourself, I’ll do it for you,” says my BEING voice. Result: Laid up now for 2 days with back pain so excruciating I want to cry. My advice to you? When God is speaking to you and telling you to do something. DO IT!

This was a recent Facebook post posted by me. Surprised?  Here I am, the Purposeful Parent, telling all of you to pay attention, to listen to your inner voices, to trust that voice and what do I do? Ignore it. Ignore it to the point of complete immobility.

As I write this blog post, I am sitting propped up in a chair with ice-packs on my back and another triple dose of Advil coursing through my veins. My good friend and massage therapist extraordinarre, Tony Trujillo of Tony’s Kneaded Touch, came by yesterday to put me out of my misery and I felt somewhat human by the time I went to bed last night. This morning is another story. I crawled out of my bed at 5:00 a.m. to slather on the magnesium ointment he gave me, swallowed three Advil and attempted to go back to sleep.

Awoke (or should I say, got out of bed because sleep eluded me) and slithered downstairs in the hopes that my morning coffee would miraculously heal me. It didn’t. I grabbed the ice-packs and cried into my coffee cup and morning paper. Another day wasted.

My plans for this weekend were completely turned upside down. Nothing is getting done. No Christmas decorations. No errands. No holiday preparations. No attendance at my daughter’s basketball games. No work. Nothing.

Some would say, “Who cares? Relax!” In fact, even my ex-husband told me this as he was kind enough to get my coffee for me when he picked up the kids this morning.

As I bumbled through my house bemoaning all that could not be done, it finally hit me. Nothing is getting done today! I gave up and gave in. I gave up the notion that my house would be Christmas-ready this weekend unless the Elf on the Shelf makes an appearance. I gave up the idea of attending my daughter’s basketball game. I gave up the plan to visit my friend’s booth at the SONO Marketplace Grand Opening.

“I gave up.”  For people who know me well, they know that these three words are not in my vocabulary. I am someone who is tenacious, persevering, and relentless in getting things done. Not today. And scary as it sounds, maybe not tomorrow either unless Tony moves in with me!

This is a real test for me. I have no time for doing nothing. As a single parent with two kids, a house, and a business, I’m always doing something. I rarely do ‘nothing’ and when I do; it’s a “forced nothing”, like today’s challenge.

Why? One could say I’m just a do-er. Others might say I don’t know how to have fun. Still there may be a few who say I have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). What would I say? Probably a combination of all three.

Here’s the lesson. I knew my week was overscheduled. I knew I was taking on too much. I knew that I should not be doing half of the things I attempted to do. But I did it anyway. And now I’m paying the price.

I’m no different than anyone else really. We all think “Oh, that won’t happen to me” when we do things we know are wrong or bad for us. But odds are that it will happen. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but some day.

God told me to slow down. He told me to relax and reschedule appointments and tasks. All week long I had this nagging feeling about the lack of white space in my calendar. I chose to disregard that feeling and now the only thing in my calendar IS white space. My only to-do is ice-on, ice-off.

We are born with intuition, an inner knowing. It’s a gift. It’s our very own internal GPS. It’s God talking to us. What happens when you don’t listen to your GPS? You get lost. Or worse, you get hurt.

You can choose to ignore that voice or you can pay attention to it and heed its direction. My guess is that if you choose not to, at some point, sooner than you think, you will be forced to listen, as I have this weekend.

Make the smarter choice. Listen.

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