In a mirror, dimly

I should listen more. I've been trying to write this paper on the Holy Spirit and it just wasn't happening. I had a mountain of books all round me, I typed fourteen pages of random paragraphs, I trawled internet databases for articles, and it just wasn't happening. I felt like I needed to take a break from it, but I was feeling under pressure since I have another fifteen page paper after this twenty-five page one to write before the start of the new semester. If I'd have listened, I'd have taken a break earlier. As it was, there had to be an intervention. I decided to switch work day for my part-time job from today to Thursday, and to drive to the college library today to take back some books and get yet more new ones for fresh inspiration, but yesterday evening I double-checked the library would be open and discovered they are shut all week. So, then, I had no plans to be at work and no library to go to. Instead I took a three-hour vacation with the friends who were coming along for the ride to the library and we sat at a coffee shop in a historic (which, around here, means about a hundred years old) local town for a couple of hours. When I got home I wrote to my professor and said I was struggling to formulate a coherent paper, wanting to put in too much autobiography or just make it a giant sermon. And he replied and said, before some other quite practical suggestions, 'You should follow where the Spirit leads'.
Immediately I felt less burdened. I cleared all the piles of scattered books off my dining table and piled them neatly on top of my bookcase. I took down all the foil I had covered my windows with to keep out the blazing sun - it's cooler now, in fact we had a very impressive thunder storm this evening - and let in the light. I did no study for the rest of the day and felt more grounded, more at home in myself. My thinking for my paper keeps centring me on this verse, and I'll just mull it over today. And listen.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, 

but then we will see face to face. 

Now I know only in part; 

then I will know fully, 

even as I have been fully known. 

1 Corinthians 13:12