As I came in through the garage and entered my home, I could smell it right away. The cleaning crew had been there. (Now, please don’t judge me. This is my one luxury that I afford myself. For a long time, I tried to keep up with cleaning my house and grew frustrated at the ever increasing imbalance of my free time and cleaning demands.) My home smelled delightfully clean and as I surveyed my kitchen, I almost squealed with delight to see how shiny everything was. I came in with an arm load of groceries and set them down. As I began to unpack the bags and put things away, I grabbed the handle on the refrigerator doors. Ahh… they felt so smooth and clean under my grip. It was so nice.
I know it seems random to be so happy with clean handles for my refrigerator door, but, for me, this is the barometer of how clean my kitchen really is– the difference between ‘surface’ clean and ‘actual’ clean. When I grab them and I feel crusty, sticky mess under my hands, I know that it’s time to put in some elbow grease and get things back on the right track.
Wouldn’t it be great if life had a barometer like that? Or maybe like the battery indicator on your cell phone. It could show you that your marriage is only functioning at 50% or that your spiritual walk had diminished to 15%. It would be great if life sent you a message that said “Plug into your charger!” Then you would know that you’d better hustle and get things back on track.
In Love Does, by Bob Goff, he tells the story of going to get his hearing checked as an adult. He and his wife were having a disagreement about how well he was hearing. (I know, I hear all you wives snickering- me, too). Turns out, his hearing was just fine, but he was only hearing what he wanted to. He paralleled that to his relationship with God, and he wrote of how he’d never heard the audible voice of God and that maybe he was only hearing what he wanted to hear from God. Selective hearing on all levels.
I am guilty of selective hearing with God. I am guilty of only hearing what I want to. I need an alarm for that. “Warning, you are wandering too far down your own tunnel!” So often, if God is nudging me about something that I don’t want to hear, I brush it off. Again, I need another alarm “Warning! Plug back in! You are not hearing the one voice that you should!”
The good news is that no matter how far off you are from your indicator or how far away you think you have wandered, you can always come back.
Deuteronomy 30 tells us that if we return to the Lord, listen and obey His voice, He will restore us again. It says in verse 4, “Though you are at the ends of the earth, He will go and find you, and bring you back.” And, even better, He’ll change our heart to be more like His (vs 6).
That’s a recharging that I could plug into.
~Shiney
