A while ago, a friend shared that he had lost his watch. He ordinarily kept it in the top drawer of his dresser. But, when he went to put it on the next morning, it just wasn’t there. As we often do, he promptly re-traced his steps to find his watch.
“Did I take it off in the car?” He cleaned out the change bins, the glove box, the console, and that alley under the stereo panel that houses vagrant items. It wasn’t there.
“Did I leave it at Walt’s house?” He scrolled through yesterday’s call log and, within seconds, heard Walt’s moderately supportive voice on the other line. “Well, Joe… I don’t see it here and I can’t imagine you taking it off. You know, they say the memory is the first thing to go…!” After a few laughs, Joe moved on with his search.
“Maybe its in the living room?”
“Kitchen?”
“Under the couch cushions?”
Poor Joe went three days without his watch and took apart many rooms of his house in the search and rescue mission. Then, one morning while habitually opening his dresser drawer to put on his watch, it was sitting alone in its large wooden home. But everything else that was usually in the drawer was gone. For only a millisecond, Joe’s brain believed the world had gone completely mad. Or, somebody was messing with him. He then realized he opened the wrong drawer. Everything else was in the top drawer, but three days earlier he had mistakenly put his watch in the wrong drawer.
Ever been there?
In day-to-day life, we can become so routine that we assume monotony. In fact, we can tend toward routine in such a mindless way that we misplace our joy. We take for granted what we are doing, who we are thanking, who is watching us and whether we are truly relying on God’s provision in our lives. We can realize one day that we just don’t have the joy we once had. We just don’t have that pep in our step that we had a month ago. Our relationships are not as fulfilling as they were earlier in our lives. We face more controversy and confrontation than enjoyment and enlightenment. We notice our arm is lighter because we lost our watch. And we miss it. We miss joy.
Logically, we then start searching for that fulfillment in all the humanly rational places. We “vent”. Some complain to spouses about friends, and some complain to friends about spouses. We try to relieve anxiety by seeking control over everything – everybody – around us. We try to fix the problem of our missing watch, our lost joy. But in our frustrated searching, we forget the base problem – we simply put it in the wrong drawer – we put our hope and joy in the wrong place.
Bene-action:
- As we reflect on the things that bring us joy, are they fleeting? Have we put our joy into only temporary, short-term things?
- Let’s think about three things every day this week that bring us joy. We need not be overly poetic or creative. In fact, the simpler the better. It will remind us that joy is often right in front of our face when we take a deep breath, hold it for several seconds, and simultaneously use all of our senses.
Common Sensitivity 