dar334

While doing the paperwork shuffle at work, I’m constantly thinking.  I sometimes feel like my mind never shuts down and I am seriously thinking about a retreat.  A mental time out.  Google had a definition for retreat as a noun and also as a verb.  I’ve chosen the noun: “an act of moving back or withdrawing”, as what my mental health needs right now.

For the past 10 years, I’ve stood by while the physical health of some of my loved ones has veered off the path I’d thought we would always be on.  I never thought “it” would happen to us.  “It” being all the bad things that happen to other people, but not us.  I remember my mom speaking of a relative by marriage who was also a friend by choice as “That Poor Doris”.  It seemed that if “it” was going to happen, “it” happened to “That Poor Doris”.  I feel like “That Poor Doris”.  I bet “That Poor Doris” could have used a retreat too.

My retreat would involve quiet time with God that has no time limit.  It would involve spending some time sorting and organizing in my Quiet Room and it would involve some time coming up with examples for the next card making party with my little angels.

The “housework” part of this ponder came to mind as I was shuffling the papers and thinking about the current situation facing our church.  As the pinball machine which is my mind was knocking the thoughts from side to side and back to the top, letting them fall where they may, I started thinking about how many times I’ve heard people say “I’ve read the Bible” or “I know what I’m suppose to do” in order to justify their not attending church or not joining Bible studies, and then I thought about how the Holy Spirit guides me to notice things I’ve never noticed before in the scriptures, no matter how many times I’ve read them.  He is always causing me to glean something new, and He has a good reason for doing so.  He seems to be guiding my decisions for the future through gleanings from the same scriptures I’ve read several times before.  He will do that for you too if you consistently open your Bible.

As my pinball machine was knocking my thoughts to and fro, I realized that the Bible is like a home.  You can’t just vacuum your house once and never touch it again.  You can never wash the windows just once, you can never mop the floors just once, you can never clean the bathroom just once.  You have to keep going back over the same areas or they will end up like a dump.  Smelly.  Dirty.  Unsanitary ………. Not a place you would want to be.  It is my opinion that forming a regular “housekeeping” routine is just as important, if not more important, in the Bible.  The longer you neglect your housekeeping, the smellier, the dirtier, the insanitarier your spiritual home will be.  And satan loves that.  Satan grows in that sort of environment.  When you think about the direction the world is going, I think it’s time will all did some “housekeeping” in our Bibles.  We need to eliminate the growth of satan.

-dar

In going to Mr. Webster for the definition of “housekeeping”, I choose definition #3 because it best relates to my topic.  He defined it as the routine tasks that must be done in order to a system to function or to function efficiently.