Home Improvement- Chapter 1

Chapter 1- Preventing Erosion

I have been reading the blog of a certain pastor in the United States.  You may have heard of him: he wrote the book "The Purpose Driven Life,"  he gave President Obama's Inaugural Prayer, and he is the lead pastor for a well known church out in California.

Now Rick is one of the most successful pastor's of the modern era in spreading the Good News "to all nations."  His teachings are a beacon of hope and challenge to many people around the world  Yet, they can cut straight to the bone. Like a surgeon performing neurosurgery in a hurricane, God's divine power to use Rick in so many precise and personal ways while life swirls around us like a tempest, I felt as though his last 5 posts were custom tailored for a character surgery. 

So let's define procrastination:  in the McBride English Dictionary, procrastination is defined as the art of finding every way possible to avoid doing the stuff we don't want to do or that just isn't any fun, until the last possible second.  I used to say it was just my way of waiting on "God's timing" to do something.  Ahhhhhhhhhh, yah. in the words of Jim Carrey looking for Mary Swanson in "Dumb and Dumber, "Sammy........Swawmy.........Swa.........Sw.........Swanson....-Look on the briefcase, maybe it's on there.  - Samsonite!  I was way off!"

God has hit me right between the eyes through the fine words of Rick Warren (here's the link to his blog, good stuff:  http://profile.purposedriven.com/dailyhope/ ).  Slowly, through my fine craft of procrastination (perfected over many years of believing I could ace a paper by writing it the night before because I got a C on the one I wrote a week early), I have been eroding the very foudnation of service to my God, my family, my job, just my entire worth to this world and the next.

And God has been speaking to me for a long time.  I'm just so thick headed, I didn't want to understand or had the delusion that I had things under control and thought, "God, I got it from here. Take a break." I used to have a monetary goal for my business on my wall.  Now the goal on my office wall reads like this:

"Go to the ant, O sluggard: consider her ways and be wise.  Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.  How long will you lie there, O sluggard?  When will you arise from your sleep?  A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man"  Proverbs 6:6-11.

Now I can be really hard on myself.  I'm talking debilitatingly hard on myself to the point that I think God doesn't even want me.  But that's not the truth either.  Procrastinatorial (is that even a word?) tendencies and all, God loves me and accepts me.  Now I just have to be willing to let Him put me to the grinding wheel and shape who He wants me to be.  Otherwise, the very foundation of my life will erode away like the man's house that was built upon the sand.

Awakened to shore up my foundation,
Freak