Have you ever noticed how you never actually get to finish housework? The minute the laundry is done someone throws something in the hamper. As soon as the carpet gets vacuumed something gets spilled. There is always something to dust, scrub, or clean. Always more trash to take out. I remember one day having spent hours giving the kitchen a good cleaning, and then I made dinner. When my husband came home and looked at the mess from dinner he said, “Are you ever going to clean the kitchen?”

I could have thrown a brick at him.

I don’t always keep up with my housework. Some areas go without as I try to keep up with my toddler. Of course you know what happens if this goes for too long. Let the dishes stack how they may in the kitchen sink for a few days and you are all of a sudden greeted by a not so nice smell. Don’t clean your bathroom for awhile and you’ll notice disgusting little colonies growing in your toilet. Things get just plain nasty if you don’t clean them up.

Wouldn’t it be nice if housework could just be “done?” A project you complete that doesn’t need to be revisited  monthly, weekly, and daily?

So often I think we treat our spiritual growth like a one time project, something you do once and then its done.

But its not is it?

It’s easy to relax in our chasing after God after a certain point. We’re comfortable, we’ve cleaned up our lives and our hearts seem rather sparkly. All of a sudden we start to neglect our walk with God. We don’t talk to Him so much, study so much, after all we’ve read the Bible before! We feel we know the lessons and got things fairly under control.

But after awhile, we start to notice something. Bitterness creeps in, or we find ourselves saying things we know we shouldn’t. We wake up one day to realize we’ve become proud and judgmental. In a word, something about our witness stinks.

I love polishing silver. There is something redemptive about taking a candlestick or tea service that looks old, forgotten, and ugly, and polishing it till it shines like new. Yet if you own an old silver tea service you’ll know that after just a few months it can look just as bad as it began if you just leave it on a shelf. The glow tarnishes faster than you even realize.

The thing is, we are a lot more like that Silver teapot, or my kitchen sink full of dishes than we realize. We think that if we aren’t working on growing with God that we aren’t necessarily in a bad place, just not moving forward. But what happens to stagnant water? It starts to stink.

We need God continually flowing through our lives, teaching us and molding us day by day. It’s not that we haven’t come far, or even that if we stop we’ll lose the ground we had, but there is always farther and deeper to go. There is always more lessons. There is always deeper places and mysteries.

I can be pretty bad at times in being consistent in my walk with God. Something in me can at times view it like a tedious chore, but it isn’t. When I find that secret place, that quiet place, where I’m really truly paused long enough to listen to Him, I find a beautiful and refreshing place that I don’t want to leave.

But lets face it, life is distracting. It’s so hard to find the time to get alone with God when you have so much drawing your attention. Between your work and your family and every other distraction our culture throws our way sometimes God’s voice in our lives gets simply drowned out.

We think that this isn’t such a horrible thing though. It just happens.

I have medications I’m supposed to take every day. One of the most frustrating things about me to my doctor is that I often am not very consistent in taking these medications. To me it doesn’t seem like a big deal, I don’t feel very different one way or another, and the side-effects are severe enough that I can argue in my mind that I’m better off without it. But these meds are to help prevent my immune system from another flair up. A flair up that could easily push my compromised liver right over the edge. A flair up that could bring me from doing fine to on deaths door in a matter of weeks. My doctor can’t say when such a flair might happen, or even if it will, but that doesn’t make the danger of my habit of avoiding these pills any less real.

The thing is, life happens. Sin and Satan are just waiting for a moment to try to infect our lives. And even besides that, we never know what tomorrow may bring. What kind of risk do we take when we don’t arm ourselves with God’s grace and love and His word firmly planted in our minds and hearts? How easily does mold and mildew creep into our lives. And then, in our weakened state, how vulnerable are we to the lies and hurts and torments that the world might throw our way.

It’s not easy, I grant you that. It’s not easy to carve out time to devote our mind to our walk with God. It’s easier to just take a little helping here and there in a church building. It’s easier to be spoon fed God’s truth then it is to go out in search of it ourselves.

I’ll even admit to you that I’m not very good at finding this time myself. Most of the time I sacrifice this crucial area in order to get more sleep. But its easy to let things go, its easy to do little. God never called us to easy.

I’m still trying to learn how to be a disciplined person. Trying to be consistent in my home, with my health, and in my spiritual growth. I know I’m a very very far way from where I need to be, but I hope that I can continue the journey.

Because this walk, this journey, its worth it. This relationship with my Father, its worth it. And even more than that, my very life and soul depends on it.

~Joy Aletheia Stevens

Photo Credit: Dishes by Fabio Penna (CC BY 2.0)   

Photo Credit: Thanksgiving preparations by liz west (CC BY 2.0)   

Photo Credit: Bible Study by Melissa J (CC BY 2.0)