As subtle as a slap in the face...

As most of the GirlTalk blog-readers are, I have been participating in a 6:00 club (5:00 seems impractical for a single college student... and sounds like a lot less sleep!). As a result, 10:00 p.m. has now been deemed "late" (that was my bedtime last night) and words like "sleepy" and "tired" have become more prominent in my vocabularly. In addition, I spend most of my time thinking about being sleepy or tired, but am also refreshed by having the time to do my quiet times in the morning and the fact that I feel like Holly and I are finally rallying together with the same purpose for once in our 3 years of living together.

Anyways, the day has gone so far with me planning out the things I need to do, staring off into nothingness as I learned (for the 300th time!!!) about the polarity of water and what the macromolecules are in microbiology, and watching the clock during Socio-Economic Impact of Plants (yes, I know you're envying my schedule, but the plant class looks like it should be pretty cool). Thursdays are comprised of just these two classes at 8:10 and 9:40, so I continued to daydream about how I wished I were at home and able to take a one-hour nap. Then, as I saw the sinfulness in the one whole hour, I thought about a 20-minute powernap. Then I picked up Feminine Appeal between these two boring classes and read about Self Control. Of course the topic of discussion was the self control of eating and sleeping (and I'm sure I would make A++'s in sleeping and eating if they were offered at UT). I read about the cities of olden days that needed protective walls, accompanied by Proverbs 25:28: "A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls." I thought, "Yeah, no big deal... heard it before" although I continued to read about the selfishness of pursuing my own pleasures at night, leading to sleeping in and scrambling to fit everything in during the day. Then during the drive home *amidst fantasizing about what I would cook for lunch and if I would take a nap or not*, I heard a radio commercial for Route 66 (some Christian program... not K-Mart). The discussion of city walls for protection came up (at this point I was like, "Hey, wait a minute... didn't I read that somewhere today?") and self-control was stressed and Proverbs 25:28 was read. I started laughing because God was so deliberate in the timing of that commercial just seconds before I reached my driveway to prevent me from over indulgence of sleep when I know that it would not be beneficial to my time management or my sleep schedule.

I just thought I'd share this with all of you participating in this early-rising discipline so that you would see the evidence of grace that you're practicing self control! It's by the grace of God that I've seen such an early hour and want to encourage those of you who feel like this schedule is going to rock your face off and send you to an early death.