Have you ever tried to untangle a ball of yarn?
It can be so difficult and time consuming to unravel the different threads that make up the muddle.
Some seasons of life can feel just like that- with a head full of ideas, responsibilities, possibilities and unfinished thoughts, and often it can be difficult to know where to begin.
This is where I find myself at the start of this season…
From practical past experience of tackling tangled threads, it seems that there are three ways to approach the task.
1. Patience
Patiently unravel every thread, slowly and carefully working through each knot weaving the ends under and over the myriads of crossed yarns. Yet this is tedious and time consuming, with very little gain.
2. The Speedy Solution
Cutting away the messy muddle to throw away, whilst keeping the pristine wound wool that is usable. However, this approach removes the endless creative possibilities of using the discarded yarn.
3. Rescue the Best, Release the Rest
Carefully unravelling the longer, more valuable threads to rescue and use them again for other projects, whilst cutting away and discarding the worst tangles.
It occurred to me that perhaps our lives and ideas sometimes require the same wisdom of compromise.
When I have a multitude of ideas and options, perhaps it’s good to realise that
* Not every idea needs to become a project.
* Not every possibility is something God is asking me to pursue.
* There can be a temptation to want to preserve every thought because letting something go feels wasteful.
* Yet saying no to some things can often create the space needed to nurture what really matters.
Rather than trying to untangle everything on our minds through sheer effort, we can lay our muddled thoughts and ideas before the Lord- not expecting God to miraculously cut through the mess leaving us with the perfect way forward (though, I believe he can do this on occasion!)
Instead, we can be willing to prayerfully, pause, think, listen and seek His wisdom for our lives and our onward journey. We can get on with the task before us, putting in the time and effort that is needed to work out whether our half-formed notions are good ideas or God ideas. Only the latter will enable us to progress well.
We can ask “What should I keep? What should I release? What is God inviting me to pursue in this season?”
Only then can we faithfully get on and pursue what we feel that God has left us to work with…
For then, God can take the threads that remain and weave them into something useful and beautiful.
We don’t need to rescue every scrap.
Faithfulness isn’t about doing everything- it’s about faithfully using what God has entrusted to us.
I think that the goal isn’t to untangle every thread of ideas we have, but to prayerfully discern which ones are worth holding onto- and then trusting God with the ones we let go.
That’s what I’m trying to do this month, as I begin a new season, cutting back what is on my desk and saying goodbye to things that, though good ideas, do not seem to be God ideas or for this season of my life.
How about you?
What good ideas are you looking at currently, that may not be God ideas?
