My subconscious does a lot of work for me. I don't know how many folks out there are aware of just how much work their subconscious performs, but mine does quite a bit. I am dyslexic. I've never been diagnosed as such, but having read about the symptoms I have little doubt. Mostly, this means that I have trouble reading and writing in that I skip words, transpose words, and mix words together unintentionally all the time. Everyone does this a bit, but I do it quite a lot. I read at somewhere around one-tenth the speed of my wife, etc. It's often frustrating as a programming to look and look for a bug and not see it when it's right in front of me because I tend to see what I am looking for rather than what's there.
Anyway, that's not really a point, but it brings me to this topic of "Intentional Living." It's a term I've been hearing a lot lately, or must have been because it's one of those phrases that's stuck in my head. I often realize that I read a word or a phrase because I keep crunching on it in the back of my mind and then I go lookup up the definition for it and my subconcious had it defined properly already. The word "pugilist" is a recent example. I had no idea where I'd heard it but I had the vague notion it meant someone who fights. Well, it's the fancy word meaning "boxer." I think I must have picked it up in a novel I was reading recently where one of the main characters liked to box.
Again, back to my topic: Intentional Living is an interesting idea. The title really says it all: you live according to your intentions. You don't live on automatic. You don't just cruise on through. I think this is a good idea, but it's incomplete. There are some things that need to be lived through, but which require so much attention that intending to concentrate in a certain way will disable you from doing it.
Instead, I suggest that Intentional Living is only the start. That we must use our Intentional Living to forge a set of subconcious habits such that we will act according to our intentions automatically. I believe this is the natural result of what Paul talked about when he said we must beat our bodies like an athlete preparing for the games. Athletes perform on automatic. If they have not honed their body to such a state that they can run, jump, throw, or punch by reflex, they probably will be disqualified before they even reach the games. The truly good athletes are able to do so on the basis of reflex and feeling because they've trained themselves to perform the correct action at the correct time without waiting for the slow travel of commands all the way from their higher brain.
Christians should train themselves to live life the same way. We need to be men and women who seek God intentionally as often as possible. Our bodies may not like this training for the corrupt flesh that they are, but will accept the program if we beat our bodies and intentionally train ourselves for the race for eternal life.
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