Changing Moods

I am fond of saying that an individual cannot let feelings dictate their reality. I know I've written about it here on this blog on more than one occasion, and I just mentioned it once again in the last sermon that I gave. It is an unpopular and difficult truth, and it is one that I struggle with consistently. Frustration and fatigue can be crippling for me when they strike. Six months into the year, and my blog output has been terrible. My reading list hasn't been much better. I've been too tired, or too stressed, or too distracted to get much done that I know I want to and need to and should get done. But how can you be tired for six months? Or distracted?

There are ways to fight this, of course. Mostly those ways are repeating this truth over and over and hoping it sticks. And it does, for me personally, until I'm tired or stressed or distracted again. Then I tend to forget. A bag of Doritos and 2 hours of re-runs later, I've accomplished nothing, done nothing to improve my "feelings," and ultimately I've stayed up late enough to ensure that I'm tired again the next day and more stressed due to a lack of personal productivity. In hindsight, repeating this truth hasn't necessarily helped in the middle of living it.

I may have run across a better way, though. I've been taking down notes and important passages from a book I read months ago and have meant to collect notes regarding for a while. Having been tired and distracted, I'm only now getting them down. Anyway, the book is Martin Lloyd-Jones' Preaching and Preachers. It is a meticulous and passionate collection of Lloyd-Jones' perspective on every possible aspect of preaching. As I collected the notes, I came across this passage:

"The preacher should never be moody; but he will have varying moods. No man can tell what he will feel like tomorrow morning; you do not control that. Our business is to do something about these changing moods and not to allow ourselves to become victims of them. You are not exactly the same two days running, and you have to treat yourself according to your varying conditions. So you will have to discover what is the most appropriate reading for yourself in these varying states. There will be times when you will be unhappy. There are these states and conditions of the soul, and the sooner you learn how to deal with them, and how to handle them, the better it will be for you and for the people to whom you preach."

Reading a book on how to improve my own occasional preaching, I unexpectedly found this paragraph that made my English teacher heart cry out triumphantly. Don't like your mood? Then read! Do something about your changing mood. That something is read. And read with purpose.

This is a far cry from my typical Nick-at-Nite marathon or glass of wine approach.

What does your anger need? Or your lethargy? What sets your distracted mind back on your priorities? What will fight against your own provincialism and victimhood? You need a plan. I need a plan. A literary plan.

Not only does reading attack a mood, it also works proactively to create it. I seldom walk away from Steinbeck without inspiration to write. The Bible keeps me grateful. Calvin and Hobbes comic books remind me to not think like a father all the time, and any book with two children on my lap listening makes me feel like the most valued man on the planet. Other authors, like Shauna Niequist, even make me want to cook, or at least enjoy what my wife cooks, and sit around a big table with good friends and loud conversation. I cannot point to anything on a screen, any screen, that comes close to producing any of this.

Whatever the mood, it seems that there's a book for that. If you're not sure what it is, pick one up anyway. It'll lead you to some feeling far more worthy of calling a reality than the predatory fatigue and frustration.