Its Monday again, happens every week but somehow it sneaks up on me, kind of like the extra 5 pounds we gain over the holidays. I have a love/hate relationship with Mondays. I don’t want to give up sleeping in a little more on the weekends or having my husband home all day…but then I also crave the routine the beginning of a new week brings. Sometimes I feel like there is something special about Monday, kind of like the first day of a new school year or New Year’s Day itself. It feels like a chance to start over, to get this week right. ..To do the things I was supposed to do last week but didn’t make it to. Monday has all of New Year’s shiny and sparkly feeling of a new beginning, and yet carries less pressure than the weight of the beginning of a whole 365 days. The whole tackling a goal that will take me 365 days to complete is seriously overwhelming to me. So, I don’t normally make New Year’s Resolutions for that very reason…but I do revere Mondays…it’s a reset day.
I hear it all the time…. from others, from myself. It’s been ingrained in us to see Monday as a new beginning: a new diet, a new exercise program, being consistent with our daily devotions, a new cleaning schedule, a new behavior plan for our kids, going to bed at a decent hour…Mondays look pretty productive don’t they? If it weren’t for Wednesday…then the feeling of Monday would just continue all week. But Wednesday is a little less shiny and a little more realistic. We succumb to the fact that some of the things that looked great on Monday seem impossible or even unrealistic after a few days of actually digging in and trying to accomplish what we set out to do…which were all really good things… usually things we have been trying to start and finish for many, many Mondays in a row. And then…Mondays’ goals just become Fridays’ regrets and we try to start again the following Monday hoping we can be successful this time, even though that hasn’t happened for us since, well…never, or at least not a time we can remember.
It’s silly how we will just continue to try to accomplish the same things over and over again even though we fail time and time again by our own standards…yet we keep on hoping against all hope that this will be the time. Some people would call that insanity…you know, doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. But I wouldn’t…I don’t know what I would call this phenomenon, but a few words come to mind…human, hope, perseverance, expectations, striving.
Seeing Monday as a reset day reveals our human nature…that we often fail, but we also crave success and want to persevere and we have hope that we will get there…so we wait on a Monday. We fail and say…well, “I will try again on Monday”. But, what if every moment were a Monday, a chance to get it right. Every moment is shiny and new with no pressure of the hours and days that follow or regret about previous failures…just that very moment you are in, right now. But time doesn’t seem to work that way for me because of my human perspective. It’s warped and skewed by what life has taught me over time in combination with lies that have been fed to me throughout my life. If I am just operating on auto-pilot, which I confess to doing too often, I don’t see time, myself, my circumstances, my abilities or any of these things exactly the way God does. If we see ourselves through His eyes, we don’t need a Monday. There is no failure; there is no standard we can never match. It’s the complete antithesis, seeing ourselves the way God does. Seeing ourselves in this manner requires such reckless abandon of everything we hold dear, such sacrifice of the things we think are important, such mindfulness that we can barely comprehend…and if we can actually do it…such clarity about the life we are supposed to live.
So, what can we expect to find in the space of letting Monday just be Monday? No pressure of changing where God placed us today or the life he has given us…just the goal of pleasing him today. It’s good to have goals, but we need to be honest with ourselves about whether we need to place so much of our focus on this particular goal/thing we want to change and whether it is eternal or not. Most importantly, do we really need to declare ourselves a failure if we don’t measure up to Monday’s standard yet again? Is our focus where it needs to be? If it’s eternal and God brought you to it…please carry on. But as I suspect, since I sit from a place of experience with letting Monday be my judge, many of our goals just aren’t. We can approach Monday like a daughter of the King with confidence that we will accomplish what He set out for us to do on that very day. We can be unstoppable for the Kingdom of God if we operate from the tower of immeasurable grace rather than the beat down basement of measuring up…to a standard that doesn’t exist to God but was simply conjured up by our simple human mind. So, what is your Monday? What do you keep starting over and over again? Is it something you can let go of so that you can see with clarity what it is He does want you to do without the distraction of your own agenda?
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