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Distractions

Recently, one of my friends had a pretty nasty thing happen on the internet. She's a photographer and shares a ton of pictures and sometimes pictures of her kids. Well, randomly, on Instagram, someone told her that they think her photos were being stolen. They weren't just being stolen to say "This is my work, let me be your photographer" they were stolen to say "This is my family, aren't we beautiful." It was scary from the outside, can't even imagine what it was like on the inside.
But the thing that struck me the most is what she said in the midst of it. She indicated that she's been getting the feeling that she should spend less time on social media and more time doing other things. And that this particular instance, could have been a push from God to get her to do what she's been asked to do.
I think we had the same thing happen recently. I've been getting a little tired of attitudes and conversations that I've been having during the day. And I had a feeling that it might be time to cut back on television. Even had the suggestion come to us from some outside observers. But you know, it's tough to deal with the detox of things that take up way too much of our time. And I started to tell myself that dealing with the fall out was going to be worse than dealing with the attitudes, because the truth is the only reason I had at the time was "Because I said so." Which though it works very well in my house, I didn't think I had the resolve to continue to say it for weeks on end.
Enter God. One morning as we were getting ready to leave, we had a little misstep in behavior, the kind that requires correction. And the television was removed for two weeks because of it. This was an old consequence, set up many moons ago, for this particular behavior. Then in the midst of the first week, the time got extended to three weeks.
It's been great! Television isn't the distraction that it was just two weeks ago and because of that, we've been able to talk about the permanent reduction of television time. We're not getting rid of it, just putting it in its place.
I really love how God honors our desires to remove things that are harmful to our walk with Him. And he takes the past and the future and mixes them all up together to answer the prayers of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Though my vision is linear, God's grace is all encompassing. His mercy is shown to be new every day.

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