Messy Redos

We are in the midst of redoing parts of our kitchen—and what a mess! Now in our third week, we can hardly wait to get everything emptied out of the kitchen cabinets back where it belongs.  Our living and dining rooms are full of dishes, glasses, pots and pans, and cleaning supplies.  Sheets of plastic hang from the ceiling around the kitchen to protect the rest of the house. Despite the best efforts of the workmen, however, there is a layer of dust on everything, and the smell of paint is giving my husband a daily headache.

Why deliberately make such a mess? Fixing problems brought on by time often requires making things seem worse before they get better.

My heart is similar to my kitchen.

Untangling Life's Knotty Messes

Last night I discovered that the yarn on one edge of my throw blanket was knotted together. The individual pieces were tangled instead of loosely hanging as designed. The other side was completely free from problems, but this one was a mess. Some strands were easily pulled out, but more often so many were intertwined that I could only loosen one to get to another. I spent more than an hour freeing the yarn from interwoven knots.

Isn’t life often the same way? We attempt to deal with a problem and find that it involves a whole knot of issues. Far too often we implement easy answers that don’t work because the difficulty is too complex.

Directionless or Directed?

God doesn’t seem to be leading me anywhere right now. It has been almost two years since I left my church staff position. At that time the only direction I had was to write a book based on my curriculum designed to grow women’s influence. I spoke at women’s conferences and retreats—opportunities which God clearly provided by his sovereign hand. I am now completing the final edits on the book to self-publish it. But what is next? No doors have opened; no voice has spoken; and no sign has appeared in the skies. I don’t like being in limbo and am getting impatient with this waiting. Have you ever felt that God left you without a compass?

How do we navigate such times? What path do we take without clear direction? How do we maintain faith when God seems to have forgotten that we are available? How is God guiding when he seems so silent?

Cleaning out Cobwebs in the Heart

I spent some time cleaning under my patio furniture last Saturday. There was a lot of dirt and many leaves caught there by cobwebs. It was impossible to simply sweep it all away; I had to disentangle the webs first.

 

I considered how difficult it is it clean out my heart, and I wondered what holds those sins and weaknesses there like cobwebs. In my case, wrong thinking is major. Maybe you also find it easy to return to old patterns of thought, which lead to negative attitudes about others. Possibly you blame them for your own sins and mistakes because of past experience. Maybe you react to someone based on what you imagine she is thinking rather than her actual words.

I tend to be very impatient with a certain person. Why?