I’m very excited again this week to join a talented group of women bloggers in an online, unedited flash mob free write. This week, the word-prompt given to us by our fearless leader Kate Motaung (whose wonderful blog can be found at katemotaung.com) is “turn”. My timer is set for 5 minutes; ready, set, 

When I first saw this week’s word in the announcement, my first thoughts were of the geographical sense.  I pictured a globe. And that was it. I was stuck. There was, I thought, no way I could write for 5 minutes about the world, other than to say that I get a little freaked out when I think of the world. It’s vastness, the fact that it’s sort of floating out there in space spinning around with me and millions of other people stuck to it. I began to feel a little panicky about that image — yes, I’m a bit odd in that respect (seeing ivy growing rampant and covering huge trees also bothers me lol) — so I pulled back and tried to approach the word from a different perspective.

And then it hit me. We’ve all heard the expression, “XXX means the world to me” or “YYY is my whole world”.

What is my “world”?

For the majority of my adult life, my world was my children & my family *and* being in control. I spent enormous amounts of time making sure that what I thought should happen was what actually happened, that my plans for my family came to fruition.

That didn’t take just physical effort. Heck no! I expended much of my emotional and mental energy on this pursuit.

That led to a train wreck of sorts about 9 years ago. My life derailed in very unpleasant way, and I began to see for the first time that something was wrong. My world wasn’t ordered correctly, things weren’t aligned as they should be.

I survived the train wreck, made some changes, and carried on. Yes, I made some changes, but they were primarily superficial. I still had so much to learn.

Then, almost 6 years ago, something happened that made that train wreck look like a 40-mph drive over a parking-lot speed bump.

In the aftermath of this life-changing, horrible event, I’ve come to see that I had it all wrong for far too long and that the changes I made 9 years ago weren’t enough. More fundamental change needed to be made.

And so, I’m slowly learning that

Ahhhh . . . out of time. But I do want to finish that, so here’s the rest:

my “world” — what I focus on, what is of primary importance — is to be God.

Instead of my agenda, His.

Instead of my thoughts, His.

I’m sure I’ll write about this more at a later time. Thanks for reading!