Learning a new habit

If any of you have ever received a handwritten note from me, you’ll laugh when you read this: I have terrible penmanship. Like, really bad. And I know you know it.  I don’t know why it’s so bad. Perhaps I’m in a hurry, perhaps I have no patience for something that is so twentieth century.

And you know that I always print. For whatever reason, I ditched handwriting (cursive) after I suffered through those lessons in fourth grade or whatever that was.

Lately, maybe as a way to challenge myself, I’ve been writing in cursive. At first, every time I picked up a pen to write a note, I was overcome by feelings of aggravation. Gritting my teeth, I would muddle through a few phrases in this sloppy, loopy, oddly angular cursive. Sometimes I would even have to stop and google how to make certain letters (x and z especially, and I still haven’t figured out how to make a good w).

But something happened recently: I was in a rush to fill out some paperwork, and I noticed that I was writing in cursive. It was the weirdest outer body experience I’ve probably ever had. It was downright creepy. To see my hand making a legible cursive text was downright bizarre, and it didn’t even take my entire mental faculty to do it. It had become second nature.

This is my lesson for you. Practice. Practice. Practice. If you want to be a more devoted follower of Jesus, practice. If you want to be more generous, practice. If you want to be kinder to your family, practice. Eventually, and maybe even strangely, it will become second nature.

So be careful what you practice. It might actually work.