God-relationship musings (and my new approach to de-stressing)

I've been reading the book Experiencing God by Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King. It's a revised edition with a revised text and study questions. I really like the book and the way it deals with how to know the will of God for your life. However, it has me realizing (again) that a lot of the time I do a crap job at listening to God. On the one hand, I want to know and do the will of God because that means doing what I was designed to do--and doing what I am designed to do rather than fighting my own design and the way the world works can only lead to fulfillment and peace and relief from the stress that comes from said fight. On the other hand, I so easily get sidetracked with distractions or doing things in a self-centered way, even though it is better for me not to. I am at a point in my spiritual walk where I feel that the calls I have received in the past have been served out effectively and that I do not have a call to anything at the moment, which means that either a.) I am at a point where I simply need to wait on God for a new call, or b.) I should still be doing something in relation to one of my "old" calls (which is really my current call). I need to be in a place where I am able to hear the new call when it comes...or I need to be in a place where I am able to hear God reminding me of my "old" call (which is really my current call)--because if I thought that I'd finished the work, or gotten distracted from it for a long period of time, I well could have forgotten it, as powerful as it was when I first received it--and teaching me how I need to adjust my life to align myself to that call again. I need to take some time to review how God has been working throughout my life in the past and where He is leading me now...a time of reviewing the road map, so to speak. Perhaps this is the reason for this time of isolation from others--it gives me some time and space to work on my most important relationship of all.

By the way, here are "Seven Realities of Experiencing God" that the authors present, though they act only as a summary of what the book says and so much more could be said about them (this list is given in chapter 5, after all, and chapters 6 through 19 deal with clarifying what is meant by each point and how each can have an impact on one's life):

1. God is always at work around you.
2. God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.
3. God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.
4. God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways.
5. God's invitation for you to work with Him always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.
6. You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.
7. You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.

Interesting, huh? Anyway, I'm off for now; going to take time for my quiet time. After that, the plan so far is to take some action on some of the things that have been on my mind lately so that I won't be stressed out any longer by thoughts of having to deal with them (I have mentioned to people before that I have realized in recent months that my tendency to try to de-stress by playing on the computer or whatnot for a while is really just procrastination and does not remove the source of the stress, which is the task which must be dealt with; de-stressing through taking action on the issues bothering me rather than by procrastinating is the new approach I am going to try, and really the one that I think makes more sense)...but we will see if God has anything to say about how my day should go.

Oh, one more thing: those of you using RSS feeds to read my blog, please let me know if you get alerted to the presence of new comments on my blog entries (I suspect the answer is "no" but I'm not sure as I'm not yet an RSS-feed user myself). I added a few comments to my previous entry, for example; does your feed-reader tell you that? Just curious. Oh well, bye for now...