Profound Thoughts Junkie

A thought struck me while reading some great blogs the other day: I have long been a profound thoughts junkie. I have loved to ponder, read, collect, and surround myself with profound thoughts from various sources. Expounding my own version of these thoughts has been a particularly intense kick. I was an English major in college with a double minor in Philosophy and Communication. Getting a paper writing assignment was like getting asked out on a date. It was a chance to put out my best stuff and primp and prime my latest ruminations, sparked by the current suitor, be it novel, poem or essay.

I'd smile at a job well done, put it aside and move to the next thought.

After college it was spiritual ruminations. I bought teaching tapes, wrote in journals, and collected "prophetic messages". Oh boy, then I was challenged about the Catholic Church, and did that ever open up a new world of rumination. I even changed how I thought about many deep issues.

But it took something much different to move to me to actual conversion.

Because, for the longest time, it never even occurred to me that there should be any connection between one's intellectual meditations and one's moral conduct. Deep thoughts may as well have been chocolate or romance novels or shoes or gambling or drugs or whatever else people get addicted to because they deliver a high. There was a definite intellectual rush involved with grasping new ideas, discovering new ways of thinking, new views and descriptions of reality. A lot of what I read was very noble. But there was rarely a connection with choices God called me to make.

It was as I started down the road of the Catholic Church that I encountered the truth that it is not so much my thoughts as my choices and actions resulting from those choices that define me as a person, particularly as a moral being. Like the book of James tells us,

But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer,
he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once
he has looked at himself and gone
away, he has immediately forgotten what
kind of person he was. But one who looks intently at the
perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful
hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does. (1:22-25)

We are supposed to think about lofty things, and then actually DO them.

And I realize I still have this addict's attraction for profound thoughts. God in His marvelous wisdom has given me a husband and two active children who assure that I rarely can complete a coherent sentence, let alone a profound thought. Doubly let alone spend time reading things with absolutely no practical application.

Love means doing. And God is love. God wants us to be about DOING His will, nothing thinking about it, not talking about it, not debating it, not lamenting what others are or are not doing about it. Serving. Starting with giving ourselves to Him and listening to Him for direction.

It is amazing to me how long it has taken me to get this.