thought soup

I have tons of thoughts swirling around in my head. I need to siphon them off a bit, so I can think better. Here's my Thought Soup du jour:

1.) Daylight savings is amazing-- it has brought more of the coveted sunshine into my life. But man, it's throwing me off my game. I had my circadian rhythms all trained there for a while-- asleep around 11, awake moments before my alarm. I was even jet-lag-proof. But the one-hour time change came, and voila! suddenly I'm an insomniac night owl.

2.) I have a lot of friends on my mind. My prayers and thoughts are getting all jumbled up. I want to list them here so I remember each one, and so you can join me in lifting positive vibes or prayerful pleas.

- A., whose body is fighting itself and for whom no satisfactory medication options remain.
- D., whose brain is sabotaging itself and for whom even waking up is a huge challenge.
- L., who is confronting all of his life's demons, all at once, and they threaten to devour him.
- N., whose father miraculously survived an anatomical implosion but is still impaled by tubes and devices.
- P., whose family was ripped apart at the seams and who now has to uproot himself to sew things back together again.

3.) There's a thought that's been forming itself in my mind the past few months. It sounds totally ridiculous when I put it to words, but here it is: I feel like I'm getting dumber. Or, to be more precise, I feel like I'm losing my depth. It seems like lately, my communications with people are getting more superficial. When I preach, the deeper theological threads remain just out of reach. I think even my sentences are getting simpler. There could be tons of reasons for this: I'm not reading theology on a regular basis, like I used to, and what goes in affects what comes out. I'm not studying a foreign language at all. I'm working more and hanging out having awesome conversations with my friends less. I'm attending to the multitude of tasks in my life and not stopping to analyze them with intentionality. Or maybe it's just a side effect of one or more of the meds I'm on. Anyway... it bugs me. I want the depth back, unless depth of soul necessarily comes shackled with depths of darkness, in which case I'm happy to stay in the shallow end.