I met with a spiritual advisor this week who told me of an old Buddhist tactic for getting your spiritual life back on track: forget the storyline in your head. As we talked more about this, he explained that culture, background, life experiences- all of this creates a narrative that can seep in and derail us when we are trying to make spiritual progress.

For example, you miss a few days of prayer and your mind starts moving in the direction of, "I must be a bad Christian if I can't even pray each day, etc."

Or, your workout regimen is getting stale and your mind starts into a story like this, "Keep this up and you'll end up with heart disease and 20 lbs. overweight, etc."

Forget about it. This is not to say that we shouldn't pay attention to the consequences of our actions. We should. On the flip side, we might do better to forget the storyline in our head and just begin again.

That's a moment for God to break in and make real progress.