I’m really ticked at myself.
Instead of making time to write in my blog, to keep connecting with and reflecting on my spiritual journey, I’ve made time for just about everything but. It’s been over a month since I’ve written, and my spiritual life reflects it. Back in November I wrote about how I wanted to write here every day. That lasted two days. But at least I was writing a few times a month.
Now I’m slipping into bad habits. It’s so easy to drift into a pattern of letting it go, of procrastinating, of thinking, “I don’t feel like it now, I don’t have time, I don’t have the energy.” Everything in my life seems to be a reflection of my lack of discipline, and my spiritual life seems to always be the first thing to go.
I want it to be easy. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and feel like worshiping God, of spending time with Him and in His Word. You’d think that if I were really passionate about God, that if He really mattered to me, it would come easily and be almost automatic.
But it’s not easy. It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s not always pleasant work. Does this mean I really don’t love God? That my relationship with him is just a sham? That I’m putting on a show for the benefit of the people in my church, and I’m just fooling myself into thinking I really know Him?
I don’t think so. If that were true, I wouldn’t really care whether it was real or not.
Jesus talks about this in the parable of the sower in Luke 8. I’d like to think my heart is fertile soil for God to grow in. But in reality, it’s the thorny, hard ground. The seeds don’t germinate, and those that do don’t last long as the weeds overtake them and crowd them out.
I think for a long time I’ve thought that the fertile soil was just something that some people had and some people didn’t. But I realized the other day that I can take the hard, dry, weed-infested ground that is my life and I can turn it into the fertile ground. But it will take work. Hard work. And lots of it.
I’ll need to prune and pull the weeds. I have to focus my life and my schedule and identify the things that steal my time. I have convinced myself that I’m “entitled” to some leisure time. I’m not. It’s not that God wants me working 24/7, but the leisure time I have I have to see as a gift, not a privilege, and I need to recognize when I’m using it in ways that are productive for me or in ways that are ultimately a waste. If I can focus my leisure time on healthy and worthwhile things, it will make the other time I have more productive too.
I need to start cultivating the soil. It’s hard and packed now. I need to dig it up, mix in fertilizers and organics, make it rich and soft. That means deliberately disciplining myself to exercise my spiritual muscles, and for me that means time with God, time reading scripture, and time writing about it. And if I’m going to make any headway with keeping the soil ready, I have to do it as often as I possibly can. Every day would be ideal, but I can’t keep letting myself go for days and weeks and months without any of those things.
And I need help to do it. I can’t keep myself disciplined. I’ve tried for years. It just doesn’t work. I need my family and my friends to keep on me, to keep encouraging me when I’m doing what I need to do, and to gently but firmly smack my upside the head when I let it go too long.
I want to make my heart fertile soil for God to begin working with. I want Him to be able to grow inside me, to begin to use me, to start to guide me towards His plan for my life. But as long as I keep shifting my focus back to myself, I’ll never get there. God can run my life so much better than I can. I now know it’s not just a matter of “letting” Him do it. It’s a matter of actively preparing myself to be receptive and in tune with Him—then God’s guidance will begin to flow and grow naturally. It may never become easy, but I hope it will at least become a habit.
Print This Post
