Today And Every Day Part 3
{GUEST POST} by Nate Whitelock
Today (part 2)
Dust
Today, I would like to talk to you about dust. If you are like me, you wouldn’t have to look very far to find some. It seems to settle on everything, doesn’t it? My mother in law actually gifted us with one of those handy dandy multi colored “feather” dusters not long ago… (There may have been a hint in there, I’m not sure)… Bottom line, dust is everywhere. Have you ever asked yourself where it came from? Or maybe wondered what it was made of?
Well, there are a number of answers. A fair amount of dust is actually made out of dead, decomposed bodies. Now don’t panic, and don’t blame me, I didn’t make it up, it’s in the dictionary! The dictionary also says that dust is “something worthless. A low or mean condition; humiliation.” It’s not just dead bodies, it’s dead particles of plant life, microscopic insects, bits of our surrounding environment, fabric… You name it. So, if you don’t mind, I won’t mince words: dust is death. Useless, worthless, forgotten, decomposed, embarrassing, waste.
I would also like to talk to you today about your Bible. We certainly don’t need to define what it is. But maybe, for some of us, we need to define what it means. James 1:18 says that The Lord chose to give us birth through the word of truth. In 1 John it says that the word of God lives in you. Birth? Life? How about purpose? Acts 17:28 says “for in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘we are his offspring.'”
These are two concepts which really should not be wed to one another, yet right now, across our world, in millions of homes, you could find a very dusty Bible. That word which brings about our very birth, is often covered in death. The words spoken from the lips of the same being who spoke the earth into existence…. are, in many homes, covered in rot. But… This isn’t about those Bibles, this is about yours, right? So, I would very much like to know, how dusty is your Bible?
Fitting It In
I can admit, that finding time to read mine every single day has always been a bit of a challenge, and when I got a job, it got a little harder. When I got married, a little more complicated… When we had kids, difficult to say the least… So on and so forth. It’s easy to say “it only takes a few minutes,” but it’s harder when you’re wiping cobwebs out of your eyes and staring at the coffee pot in hatred because it hasn’t finished brewing yet. Then, well, you’re drinking your coffee, and the news is on. And then it’s time to go to work. The day is still young, is it not? Work is work, and you have to do it. Same with school. But when your lunch break comes along, you have to eat, and you’re catching up with a coworker, friend, updating your Facebook status, and rushing back to your day. When you get home, you seem to have everything waiting on you. The things that didn’t get done yesterday, or the day before. Maybe it’s the kids and the spouse wanting to spend time with you. Nothing wrong with that at all… And then of course you can’t miss that TV show you’ve waited all week to see. Back on social media to talk to everyone you know about what you watched and a plethora of other topics… And before long, it’s time to go to bed and start all over again. Some of us, probably most of us, even encounter some pretty stressful situations in that day to day struggle… It’s normal. We’ll always have worries and complications. I would also say that most of us have some sort of crutch or coping mechanism.
What is your go to, when the pressure is on? As far as stress goes, as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that I didn’t really know what stress was until a few years ago. I’ve also gotten to a place in life where part of my coping mechanism is my routine. I start my morning with a cup of coffee and devotional, or, yes, my bible. Then on comes the news and weather, and then I’m ready to walk out the door. It’s on the days that I don’t do that, that I find myself unprepared for the world I meet with. Those are the days when temptation is hardest to resist, or the days that I’ve fallen. Those are the days when nothing seems to go the way it should, and the tension seems to pile up.
This isn’t a magic formula to make everything go right in your life, believe me. It’s a simple starting place. See, when we start off each day by making God and his word a foundational, pivotal aspect of our lives, it shows. Once he knows that we’re actually listening, he very often uses those moments to whisper to us the words that we need to hear that day. I have lost count of the times that it’s happened to me. I also can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard “I forgot,” or “I didn’t have the time,” or “I had more important things to do….” From people who do indeed have some very important things to handle. My response is always the same: how about you take the time to show God that he’s number one in your life, and let him equip you to handle all that stuff? It might well be that all the chips don’t fall into place every time. That isn’t always how it works. But your heart will be ready. Your mind will be sound enough to handle it and make the right choices. You will be learning every day how to be more alive in Christ. That, to me, is something that is valuable enough, important enough, to not let dust settle on it. If you come down to it, a dusty Bible is evidence of a starving, dying heart. You NEED that nourishment to survive. And you need it TODAY.
No Time Not To
In my office on a shelf sits a diploma from Liberty University. We have a sort of love/hate relationship. To be perfectly fair, it doesn’t mean much. It does bring back a lot of memories, though. Good, bad, and everything in between. I often find myself torn between knowing exactly what all it doesn’t mean, and being proud of what it does. I’ve had a hard time before, isolating something that I really took away from my “higher” education in the past, and the other day it hit me… I learned to keep on reading, keep on studying, and to keep on seeking. From when I was very young, I was raised reading my Bible. That was the foundation. As I got older, I drifted in an out of regular devotions. Going to school taught me the importance of sticking with it, getting that spiritual heart food every day. It taught me to really study and really search God out. I learned to much more effectively apply what I read, or what I already knew. The beauty of it? You don’t really need a framed diploma to learn that lesson. You just need to make the choice, and follow it with commitment and action.
So today, may you make the time to start your day off right. May the words of the God who created life, breathe new life into your heart. May his wisdom be yours, may he guide you in the way you should go. May you find peace in the midst of the storm through reading and meditating on the scriptures, and may you never allow dust to settle on them. Today, pick up your Bible. Read it. Be filled, be renewed, be blessed!
P.S. Please don’t go out and buy a dust jacket for your Bible!
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