December 16, 2011
Spring Cleaning
Would you believe that right in the middle of the holidays I’m doing a
huge house spring cleaning project? Me neither. It all started so innocently.
All we wanted to do was to buy a new bed. When we took the old bed out and
moved it upstairs, someone suggested we should steam clean the carpets before
bringing in the new bed. Next someone said, “Well,
if you’re going to clean the carpet, you really should first paint the room.”
So here I am two weeks before Christmas stumbling over bedroom furniture now in
the living room, putting masking tape around baseboards and carrying a paint
brush around. This is so not what I had in mind. I do however see similarities
in the situation with making a request of God. If I ask Him to increase my
faith, He’s likely to give me other spiritual projects to do just in order to
build that faith. A simple request is not always so simple.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----The painting thing sounds like you’ve taken a step beyond Spring cleaning into a little renovation. Your simple desire to buy a new bed ending up becoming a little renovation with a whole lot of effort in between comes from a principle by which the Lord operates. To His frustration, I keep at least one toe on my brake pedal. This isn’t so much that I don’t want to go where the Lord wants me to go (although I have to admit...) This isn’t so much that I don’t want to go too fast. And I definitely want to go pretty far. It is that memory thing; if things happen too fast I feel lost; I fear I won’t be able to find my way back; even worse, I fear that some things I once thought important to do will get confused with the rubble of time in the shifting itineraries and be thrown out. Funny thing is, all that emotional ambivalence seems to confuse me to the point that too many things I need to do become time’s rubble anyway, and just get left behind.
-----That isn’t the Lord’s will. And I know it. I don’t know exactly where the Lord wants me to go. A lot of people claim they do know that about themselves (a few have thought they know it about me.) But I’ve seen how suddenly life turns corners. And I’ve seen the differences those corners make. The mere possibility of such corners beyond the present moment makes the will of His in which I must pray, by which I must think, for which I must work much less a matter of situations and things. Life comes at you several events at a time. Some events you can completely control, others you can’t really control at all. If being in His will was more about the situations and things of our lives, we would have to know and be quick at several different versions of the two-step in order to stay on course with the will of His we had been knowing.
-----I completely agree that the Lord needs us at specific places at specific times having specific attitudes from which are delivered specific ideas to specific people. He is not a big, out of focus, fuzzy generality. He is a God of details, incredibly minute details. Even the smallest detail does not escape his purpose, the proton, the electron, the pion, nuon, gluon or the elusive quarks or strings. Each one and all of them together making up the entire physical universe serve His specific purpose at a specific moment in a specific place. So do we right wherever we are in the middle of it all.
-----So His will to me now seems less a what and where and more a how that will expose a why (maybe expose it eventually.) Don’t get me wrong, the what’s and where’s of His will become knowable when you look at the systemic affairs of history. And when I understand that my abiding in His will is my use of His principles to determine all of my interactions with all life’s events coming at me, then I can feel secure that what I am doing at wherever I am is indeed His will for me at that time which will lead me to where His purpose for me is next. A little brake pedal can be appropriate, sometimes a little Bible study or pondering is necessary, sometimes a little attitude shift is worth the wait, and always a little prayer is useful.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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