Habits

I am a creature of habit.  I think my friends just might laugh at the simplicity of that statement.  The truth is, I can tend to be so habitual at times that it's almost borderline OCD.  I've written previously about my analities when it comes to grammar, but that's honestly just one of the many issues that I have.  ;-)

• I pretty much eat the same thing for lunch every day at work.  A sandwich, a yogurt, and a diet coke.  The meat product within the sandwich might change, and the flavor of yogurt might change...but it's still a sandwich and a yogurt none-the-less.
• I have a morning routine that I don't even think about when I'm getting ready.  It takes me an hour and a half to get it all done.  If I do something out of the ordinary one morning, it throws me off, and I subsequently tend to forget a step.  I get terribly disoriented on vacations.  Things just aren't where they usually are, and I'm sunk. 
• When I shop at Walmart, there's a specific pattern I have to take in order to work my way through the entire store and not miss anything...starting with toiletries and ending with groceries.  The same goes for the mall.  You have to work your way down one Park City wheel spoke to the next.
• Don't even get me started on work.  Let's just say that I love spreadsheets.  I love organization.  I love tying out account balances to the penny.  Give me a list of items to step through and check off one by one, and I'll be in my own little piece of heaven.  And I love it most when nobody messes with my system.  Please, just let me do it.  ;-)  I have certain daily rituals that need to be done, and I find that I do them automatically. 

That's just the tip of the iceberg for me, but I'm pretty sure we all have habits of some sort.  Granted, I err on the extreme side, but we all have things we do without thinking.  There are things that just come naturally, whether it stems from an OCD personality or if it's a learned trait.  We react a certain way.  We have a daily routine of some sort.  I'm not totally sure how it happens all the time.  It just seems to happen. 

So here's what I don't understand.  Why in the world is it so easy for me to have random habits and things that I need to do in order for my life to not feel off-kilter, and yet when it comes down to important, life changing, God-honoring habits, they never seem to stick? 

I've come to realize that I need some kind of structure when it comes to reading my Bible consistently on a daily basis.  I bet you would have never guessed that based on the description of my previous habits, huh?  Haha.  So, a while back I started working through a 365 day reading plan yet again.  Of course, now that I'm a couple of months into it, I'm hitting those fun Old Testament books that aren't always the easiest to read through.  I realized this weekend that somehow I had gotten a few days behind.  I had fallen out of my habit for a bit.  Thankfully, it's easy enough to catch back up, but I've often found that once you get out of the habit, even for a little, it's even easier to give it up all together.

Like I said, I don't understand why sometimes it seems so hard to make daily time for getting into God's word, but I'm finding out something interesting along the way. The more I make a concentrated effort to consistently connect with God, the more habitual it becomes. The more I get to know Christ on a daily basis, the less disoriented I feel. And the more I spend time with God, the more I realize how much I need His presence in my life in order to really live.