Manual Shuffle

Though time doesn't change and the amount of minutes in a week could be neatly charted off or packed up in equal size boxes each week and put away, some seem to take up infinately more space and take up more time than is fairly alloted to them.

This week was one of those that seemed to steal minutes that didn't belong to it. But ironically, looking back on it, its "box" of time seems drab at the very least. A box filled with quantity but not necessarily quality. One holding too many minutes stolen by the library and exam studying - so many in fact that they seem to run together and can't even be organized into hours and days....

Weeks like that can be hard to manage, hard to balance and hard to run through. Even if you find a few unclaimed minutes to run, they might be heavy - weighed down by the pressures of tasks to be completed. This is how I felt when I bundled up earlier this week for a mind-clearing run. And despite the freezing weather, my brain unthawed in at least one beautiful moment.

I have a running playlist on my phone (let's be real, it's actually the only playlist on my phone...). Usually I just start running and every song that comes on works for me and speaks to me. This day it didn't. The shuffle feature failed me too - playing every song that I didn't want to hear. So.... I manually shuffled. I played one song four times in a row, moved on to another, and then went back again. And I took control of my stride and my run and my thoughts.

And some days - some of those long weeks - we have to manually shuffle just to get through. It might not be as smooth or as easy. It might be annoying or frustrating. We might get stuck on a song we don't want to hear. But the beauty of manual shuffle is that we can change it. we can repeat things that helped us think clearly. We can match the music to our mood and run through it. We can listen to the same song 8 times if that's what it takes to get through.

Life is filled with manual shuffle weeks. We can match prayer to challenge and run through them.