Three 5s, Two 4s, and Two 3s.

This is from the Reset Journey we're doing at church. I'm actually not sure what week I'm supposed to be on. I missed a couple of weekends and lost track of where we were. But me personally, I just did the journaling exercise for Prompt 3 of Week 3. Week 3 is all about surrender.

Day one was to journal about your fears. (Not the "spiders" or "dark" or "heights" type fears.) Day two was to think through your day from beginning to end and think about all the things you tried to control. Then, after you had made that list, to go back through and list the underlying fear that motivated that need for control.

Day three, which i just did, was to return to the day two's list. To rewrite the items and to rank them from 1 to 5 according to how tightly you try to hold on to them, with 1 meaning "you care about it, but it doesn't consume you" and 5 being "the thought of anything upsetting that one would really stress you out". I almost skipped the prompt, cause you know, its Friday and I'm not only a couple days behind, but I don't even know if I'm on the right week. And, here's the kicker, I was pretty certain I'm not real big on control anyway, so didn't figure the prompt wasn't going to mean that much to me.

But I did it. I looked back at my list and rewrote it. And put a five next to the ones that really, really stress me out when something upsets my feeling of control. A four next to the ones that are still pretty critical. A three next to the ones that were important, but not as stressful. And suddenly I didn't have any items left to rank. Really? Really? I'm not an uptight person. Oh sure, I'm "high maintenance," as Christopher Robin would be quick to point out. But I'm far from uptight. So I look back over my list, seeking items that I could downgrade. Yet I'm fairly confident that they are all accurately ranked.

huh.