Belinda and I have recently been remodeling our house… Let me start over. Since moving to be closer to the church, it has been nonstop work as we update our house. I joke about it often, but it has been fun. What guy doesn’t like tearing down walls, and ripping up flooring? While I am not sure that she has enjoyed the nonstop dust and dirt that I create, it has allowed us some special times together that we laugh and smile about from time to time.
The latest project has been the creation of a laundry room in a location next to our bedroom. When we purchased the property the laundry room was accessible only from the garage and I was frequently reminded, almost every week actually, that it sure would be nice to have a laundry room that did not require her to go down a hallway, through an exterior door, to the opposite side of the garage, up two steps, and then squeeze between the furnace and water softener, to open the washing machine door while standing sideways. The old saying of “if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” was beginning to become a reality in the Watters house. So I did what any husband who is trying to find leverage to purchase a new pontoon boat would do. I told her with a smile that I would build her the laundry room of her dreams.
Remodeling that room, had a trickle-down effect upon the rooms that you had to go through to reach it. The primary room being the master bedroom. Everything that was being relocated or replaced, seemed to stop in the master bedroom. There was a tool section, a furniture section, a materials section. It was like a maze getting in and out of bed some days. Eventually I was able to reduce the items to just a few pieces of furniture that needed to be placed, so I put them along a wall out of the way. It was perfect except the light switch was on that same wall. When you entered the room, you would have to walk around the furniture and then reach over and flip the switch. It was a hassle and neither of us enjoyed it. So, after about 4 months I decided to move the furniture to where it would permanently be. We would finally be able to walk in, flip the switch and live like normal people.
But something incredible happened. After moving everything into its proper place, and after making the walkway clear and the light switch accessible, I still found myself walking around that spot where the furniture had previously sat. Just as I had been doing for months. It felt awkward walking in and doing what most people would find to be normal which was to step through the door, reach over, flip the switch and have light. The routine for me was to step through the door, walk around an imaginary table, and then reach in and flip the switch. If you would have watched me, you would have questioned my mental state.
I had established a pattern and developed a habit. It didn’t take much effort, and I didn’t have to work at it. It just happened.
We do the same each day of our life. We are developing good habits, and sometimes we are developing less than desirable habits. We like the good things such as increasing our physical fitness and reducing our junk food intake, but the other things we often don’t realize until they are advanced. They are not always intentionally sinful, but we might overlook our prayer time, or the time spent in communion with God due to a hectic schedule for a specific day. Before we realize what is happening, it becomes several days, and we are soon accustomed to just leaving that out of our routine. We miss our time in corporate worship with the community of believers in our church because of an unplanned happening, then before you know it, we are out again and then it becomes easier to just go when we can rather than when we should. There may have been a time when our word was solid and we could be depended upon, but things came up, life happened and now we are like blades of grass in the wind. We go where it blows us and we do what we feel like doing.
Kurt Vonngut once wrote, “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.” If we could take the liberty of extracting some truths from those words it might look like this: “Be careful with the little habits, because one day we will look back and realize they were the beginning of bigger things.”
Be careful of the furniture that you temporarily place along the walls of your life. Guard your heart with great care. Through our daily action or inaction, we are establishing new norms that will either be beneficial for our spiritual growth or a hinderance to us being the mature believer that God desires us to be.
Lord, help us to establish good patterns and good ways of living. Help us to always offer our best to you. When we stray, correct us. When we falter, strengthen us. Help us to be faithful with the little things of today.
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