Can we just talk about sweeping dirty floors for a minute? I am not always the best housekeeper. I'll just be honest with you, it's not my forte. I'm not exactly sure what my forte is all the time, but I know organizing and keeping tidy isn't it. But, it still has to be done. While sweeping my floor the other day I decided to pray. I asked God to please show me what he wanted me to know about him and my relationship with him from sweeping. The crazy thing...he actually had something to say to me in the sweeping.
Have you ever tried to sweep a floor in a room with baseboard vents? No? Don't. It's terribly frustrating. You begin to sweep. You have a pretty good rhythm going and you're getting all the sand and dust and dog hair all collected into one pile. Oh, you don't have pounds of dog hair floating around your floors? Must just be me. The more you sweep, the more your pile of debris gets blown around by the vent. It becomes nearly impossible to sweep the floor clean with the air blowing from those vents. There are two options. Either, turn the air off while you sweep or move out from in front of the vents.
As I swept and berated myself for not just going upstairs and getting the vacuum cleaner, I realized that God was talking to me. What he said was this. It is really hard to get cleaned up while we are being attacked by the world's airflow (read: temptation and sin). What we have to do is find some stillness. We have to get away and allow God to sweep up our mess in the stillness of our relationship with Him. Otherwise, we just keep blowing our sin around. We may give up our poor eating habits but pick up reading soul-polluting material. We might get the profanity out of our mouths just to find a new temptation in our hands. We have to step out of the whirlwind of sin and temptation and into the peace and stillness of God if we hope to be truly cleaned up.
For me, it is hard to get down to the root of what is going on in my heart when I'm wrapped up in the busyness of the world. I get pushed around my comparisons and pulled down by unrealistic expectations of myself and other people. So, I have to step away. I have to find the quiet. I can tell you that in a house with two kids under five, two dogs over nine (read: lost of bathroom accidents), and way too many toys to count that quiet can be hard to find. I am a truly blessed woman. My husband makes time for me to be alone during the week. He is a true blessing from God that I am thankful for each day. But, what about when we can't get that time away? Does it mean that we just keep getting blown around?
No. I think that a big part of the peace of God is finding his protection in the midst of the chaos.
Do you know what I figured out while I was trying to sweep around those baseboard vents? I can use the dustpan to actually block the air and sweep everything up. Jesus is our dustpan. He came here, into our mess, and stood between us and the whirlwind of sin. He said, "I'll hold back the fury while you get to the Father and get cleaned up."
We can find the peace of God in the midst of the chaos. We can find the stillness of God in the three-ring circus that is our home some days. We can find worship of the Lord in our home while the kids play indoor soccer in the living room (it's raining today).
1 Corinthians 14:33 says, "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace..."
God wants to bring us peace. John 14 tells us that God sent the Holy Spirit to give us peace. But, peace is not just cutting off the world and noise and expecting to find the perfect solitary place to encounter God. Peace is realizing that when the world starts blowing you around you can find protection in the Father.
I pray that we can all find peace in the Father today. I pray that He will speak to us in the mundane tasks of our lives like sweeping the floor and drinking coffee to the sounds of indoor soccer. 😉
I hope that this has blessed you to be a blessing to someone else. Talk to you again soon. Love you so much.
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