I’ve got a project staring me in the face. Do you have any of those? Maybe it’s a closet that needs reorganizing or a deck that needs to be stained or a pile of garbage that needs to be cleared away.
Every time you look at them, they are asking you to pay attention to them.
If you’re like me, you look at them and then plop on the couch and start scrolling through your phone. After an hour, you’ve bought two necklaces and a pair of shoes from Facebook.
This project staring me in the face is just one of many more to come. There is always something to do, right? Don’t we deserve a little time to just … sit?
The thing is I’m pretty good at self-care. I sleep and eat and pamper myself. Those things make me feel good. Shopping on Facebook does not. It makes me feel like a sloth. I hate feeling like a sloth.
A friend sent me a text with the words Ephesians 5:3-20 with a bunch of prayer hands emojis. I got the hint that she’s praying those verses over me, so I thought I’d check them out. One line jumped out at me.
“Don’t live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants.” (Ephesians 5:17 Message translation)
I don’t know that cleaning my closet is doing Kingdom work, but it does make sense that blindly sucking my bank account dry from online shopping or entering the realm of Insta-jealousy is NOT part of living a purpose filled life.
And I do get a powerful sense of satisfaction from a tackling a task. I bet you do too.
I think about those words from Ephesians. Carelessly. Unthinkingly.
They really are terrible words. They are habit forming words.
But so are words like Excellence, Goodness and (my personal favorite) Kindness.
Can we make a pact? Can we hold each other accountable for one thing? Let’s catch ourselves one time today doing something carelessly or unthinkingly and then let’s stop ourselves and move on to something more intentional.
We might not get that closet clean in a day, but at least we’ll know we’re on the right path.