A few months ago, we got home from our third tour.

The more we tour, the better we get at it. For instance, we knew that we were going to need a week of down time after we got home in order to refresh and regroup.

Oh, how wrong we were!

It turned out we needed about three weeks of downtime to recover from the tour.

Not only that, we felt way more wiped out than we had from the previous two tours.

This didn’t make sense. Our second tour was longer than our third. And our first tour covered way more mileage. Why the fatigue?

It didn’t take long to figure it out.

Our third tour was in the Pacific Northwest. We happen to have lots of friends in the PNW. So unlike tours one and two, tour three included a lot more social time with our peeps.

Before Melissa and I left town, one of us (I’m not going to say who, but their name starts with “Z”) was concerned about how all that social time would impact our tour.

The other one of us (again, not saying who, but you do the math) said it would be fiiiiiiiine.

When we look back on it now, we can see that the warning signs were there. The first person (me! it was me!) was getting an intuitive hit that we might need to pull back on the social time during the tour. And the other person (Melissa! It was Melissa!) was trying to ignore it.

And even though we have an agreement that disagreements such as this one necessitate greater reflection, we didn’t do that. The desire to hang with our friends won out. So we barreled on ahead.

A few weeks after we got back, Melissa was on the phone with our dear friend Doug LeBow.

Doug is a highly-successful professional musician with a lot of experience. When Melissa told Doug how much social time we included on our last tour, he gave her a talking to.

“You can’t do that!” he said. “When you’re on tour, your job is to do the gigs and rest. That’s it.”

I should add that Doug is highly extroverted. When your highly extroverted friend tells you that you needed to cut out the social time? You listen.

Looking back at our third tour, we can see that there was a lot that went into our social decisions.

For one, there were people we love and wanted to connect with.

For two, we weren’t always listening to our own energy needs when making our social decisions.

For three, we tend to underestimate how much energy social time takes out of us, especially when on tour.

For four, we tend to underestimate how much energy our gigs take out of us, especially when on tour.

And then there’s the fifth consideration, arguably the most important one.

Our ministry, OhMyGod Life, is about surrendering to Spirit and doing what Spirit asks us.

Sounds great, right? So romantic and devotional.

And it is.

But sometimes what Spirit asks of us is not what we want to do.

We want to go on tour and hang out with our friends. Even though we’ve now been shown that it doesn’t work.

Surrendering to Spirit, in this case, now involves doing something that’s hard.

Something that will involve needing to treat ourselves more gently. Something that will mean saying “No” even when it’s hard.

And something that will involve a deeper surrender to Spirit than we’ve ever done before.

Which is why we got into this ministry thing to begin with.

But still.

It’s this kind of surrender – doing something even though it’s not what we want to do and trusting there are deeper reasons involved that we can’t see yet – that make the spiritual path so challenging. And ultimately rewarding.

By the time this gets posted, we’ll be in the middle of tour number four. We pray that this one will be different. And I mean that literally.

But I also know that Spirit is super smart. Waaaay smarter than we are. And we can trust It.

So, in that sense, I’m not worried at all.

It may be hard. It may be challenging. But if we’re following Spirit’s guidance, I know we’ll end up exactly where we’re supposed to be.

And hopefully our asses will be a little happier when we get there.

What’s your experience with spiritual ass kicking? Share your comments below!

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