IMPULSES

Impulses can at times truly control our lives. We can't always seem to put our finger why we have them either.

Among those times can be the moments when we sit down and look at our lives. We see it is less than we desire and suddenly are captured by those mental vows to change.

However, to often they end up just like New Year's resolutions. They feed the moment, but once the emotion is drained by time, the passion flees and we don't keep that energy flowing.

The same can happen with vows we make to the Lord. During some occasion of spiritual touch we want to grasp heaven and make it our own in this life.

All the world flees in our thinking and suddenly sense eternity actually collecting in our souls. As if we could fly up to be with the Lord at the very second.

In a heartbeat the desire swells and we have this compulsion to rise above this earth and become the perfect saint. Dreams attach themselves to the mind and pretty soon, our ambition is to be part of the Lord's most beloved.

It is all fantasy naturally. Something that allows us to wander the mountain of spirituality, but never a place we can dwell forever.

So we tender ourselves into a mint of reason that our ambition left with the wind. That in reality that sudden urge to be a perfect saint was other than practical.

Somehow in it all, we do our best to not cope with the sense of feeling we disappointed the Lord. We might even look up towards the sky just to be sure there aren't any brewing thunderbolts. When we don't see them, we relax and breath a little easier.

Does God really take such vows seriously? Will he somehow treat us as guilty of an unpardonable sin from not keeping our vows?

I think God knows our heart and what the real reasons are for our behavior. That includes knowing the difference between when our moods control our thinking, instead of something else.

Hopefully, when we fall short in such situations, we learn from them. Sometimes we do, others we do not.

And if we don't we will definitely repeat the process. Which only leads to other situations of doing the same thing.

Along the way, God's spirit can truly help to grant us sight to appreciate how we are so prone to such weaknesses and move ahead in the process.