Day 4: Must fix my attention span

I begin by apologizing for the delay in posts. Apparently I don’t know how to post things at a specified time, like I thought I did. Writing I can do. Figuring out WordPress is a completely different matter. So be prepared for multiple posts today as a catch up. Because I won’t be timing them to publish at a certain time.

Day 4 was Sunday. Sunday for my family means attending church. But here’s the thing. I haven’t heard a sermon from start to finish, and understood it, in a great many years. I’d really love to say that on Sunday I was just completely ministered to and learned something so deep and full of inspiration that it will change my life forever. Unfortunately that would be a complete lie. Not that today’s sermon wasn’t inspiring, it’s just that I had a very very very hard time paying attention. And no, it wasn’t because I couldn’t understand the minister.

The big problem is that every Sunday for the past several years, I have sat in church services and read the notes from the service about five times during the service. After nearly memorizing them, I’d eventually look up at the minister and pretend I’m paying attention, all the while making to-do lists in my head or trying to remember where I placed a certain item.

See, church services are a lot like those pre-mentioned dinner dates for me. I used to pretend to understand, but really, I’d only get a couple words (at most) out of the whole service even if I was paying rapt attention to the speaker. It isn’t apathy that made me fail to pay attention, it was the fact that paying attention or not paying attention, I couldn’t understand a word that was said. But now that I can? Well, I seemed to forget during Sunday’s service that if I had been paying attention, I would have understood what was being said.

So what I’ve learned on Day 4 is that in order to sit in any type of service, seminar, or what-have-you, I’m going to seriously have to work on getting my mind to focus on a speaker for more than five minutes at a time without wondering to my [not so] exciting domestic life.

The other thing I learned on Day 4 is that my front door is very squeaky and needs to be oiled.