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From the pen of Pastor John Harding
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Last week my Mom helped me clean and rearrange my office. We had talked about moving the office to another room, but decided we should leave that room available for other activities at the church. Somehow my office had become a dumping ground for a lot of different things and it looked and felt more like a storage room than an office.
In addition to every shelf being completely full, there was piles of stuff everywhere. Needless to say, it was not inviting and it was definitely not conducive to getting much done in a very efficient manner. There were drawers filled stuff from when my Dad was the pastor and there were books on the shelves that talked about the new way of doing things that were written in the early 1980's.
As I write this I am sitting in a much cleaner office and an environment that is not distracting or overwhelming. There might still be few to many thing on my desk and a few random piles of things on the shelves that need to be dealt with, but overall things are organized, neat and the whole feel of the office has changed.
When I come into my office now I don't feel like I am entering a storage room. I don't sit down at my desk and feel overwhelmed by all the stuff that doesn't belong in here. I can sit down and easily move forward on the tasks that are before me and, strange as it may sound, I feel freed from something that was holding back my effectiveness and efficiency.
This same type of thing happens in our relationship with God more than we realize or care to admit. We let a lot of stuff, it may even be good stuff, pile up in our lives and it pushes God out. The stuff gets to the point that it is overwhelming and although we can continue to function we struggle to move forward. We end up just treading water and missing out on a lot of what God has in store for us.
On the other hand, sometimes we tell ourselves that once we get everything cleaned up we will be able to really grow in our relationship with God. The problem with this way of thinking is that we will never having everything completely cleaned up. My office looks like a new office almost, but there are still a few piles to deal with and even when those are all cleaned up, new piles will appear. How do you think all that stuff got in there in the first place?
Even when my office was a disaster, I was still able to get things done, it was just a lot harder than it should have been. Now that the office is clean I feel better about things, but I could just as easily focus on the fact that it isn't perfectly clean and organized. The truth is that God wants us to be moving forward in our relationship with Him at all times, but we have to make time and room for that to happen. We have to make it a priority which may mean we have to get rid of some good stuff in our lives to experience the better life that God has planned for us. It also means we can't wait until we have everything all cleaned up and figured out because that will never happen without making time and space for God on a regular basis.
May God bless you as you seek to move forward with Him on a daily basis.
Pastor John
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