About Lists

I am a lover of lists. I make shopping lists. I make lists of household tasks to complete over a long weekend or a vacation. If I am traveling, I make a list of the things I want to pack for the journey. Lists order these things, provide a way to see what needs to be accomplished, and helps you track your progress as you work through the items.

I have a friend who is a mystic. She is a minister, a counselor, a teacher of centering prayer, and I value her wisdom. We met a few months before I left the big city to return to my rural roots, but we have kept the friendship alive via email and telephone calls. There were two or three emails that she sent me in which she wrote about the things she needs to do regularly in order to feel strong and healthy in all respects. I couldn’t help noticing that she always mentioned the same things. This lady really does know what she needs to do. Her lists usually began with centering prayer and sleep, and the other things assumed different places under those two priorities. I would call it a list on maintaining health, or self-maintenance. The complete list would be:

Centering prayer
Sleep
Diet
Exercise
Nature
Drinking water

At that time, I was going through a period in which I was trying to order my life around priorities, and I allowed her list to be one of my guides. But as I did my prayer journaling and worked through various things that happened, I came to develop my own list. If I call my friend’s list a “road map” to self-maintenance, I could call my own list a “road map” to restoring flagging energies, or self-restoration, because after I had followed her list, I still needed to restore energy. There is a smidgen of duplication in my own list, which I call a self-restoration list:

Centering prayer or prayer journaling
Creative activities of all kinds
Personal relationships
Closeness to nature
Solitude and silence

I went so far as to make a sign that shows both lists and tape it up where I see it several times a day. I honestly believe that a person who does these things daily will be healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. (Although I am a voracious reader, I do not include reading or study or even Bible study on the list because all this sneaks in through the other activities. Centering prayer can be done over a passage of scripture or some other writing, for instance, and in solitude and silence I will read and reflect.)

My friend with the brain tumor is having memory difficulties, and for some time I’ve known that she has a birthday present for me but forgets to bring it to church, which is where we usually see each other. (My birthday was in December.) The other day she gave me the present. I cherish the present itself, but it is the card that really got to me. My friend included in her note a list of qualities that a “Godly” life should have, and her list consists almost entirely of words of one syllable:

“To live a life of love, hope, peace, joy, health, trust and faith, and many prayers.”

Now there is a list for you! I would say that if I work to follow the first two lists, my life might actually come to illustrate the qualities on the final list.

So I took my sign down, re-did it to include the third list, and now it looks complete.