I hate filing. It’s boring and I can always find an excuse for doing something more “important.” So for quite some time, rather than filing my sermons neatly in appropriate folders I’ve just been dropping them in a drawer, rendering them fairly useless if I want to look up something that I may have already said–or just about anything else for that matter. So I’ve hired my granddaughter to put my files in order.
This got me thinking about what else I may be failing to keep in order. Is my spiritual life organized and in the process of deepening? Are my prayers as full as they ought to be? Is the rest of my labor at church focused or is it just a hodgepodge like my files were? Am I being the type of pastor God wants me to be to the people here at St. Paul’s or am I failing to be that which I should be just because I’m too lazy to do what needs doing?
My wife and I are going on vacation next week and I want to spend some time pondering how I can be a better servant, a better pastor, a better subject of the King of kings.
Now I suspect many who read this are just as likely as I am to avoid unpleasant tasks. No one wants to do boring things and no one, especially, wants to do hard things. But putting them off just makes more trouble down the road, and there won’t always be someone like my granddaughter to pick up the slack. So here are a few questions for you to ask yourself this week:
+How go things with your soul? Is your life a good reflection of the life of a follower of Jesus? +What work for God and His people have you been putting off? +Are you simply drifting in your spiritual life, showing up on Sunday for church but not doing to much else? +Are you praying for anything other than your self and your immediate loved ones?
There are a lot of other questions you could ask, but you get the idea.