Spiritual Discipline

This week, I've been taking the opportunity to go through some stacks. I almost always have a stack of papers on my desk, and sometimes more than one, depending upon the number of projects on which I am currently working.

Things have been piling up at home. For several months, I've been behind on entering receipts and bills into the computer for taxes. We've been dealing with tax paperwork, adoption paperwork (again for taxes), school papers for kids, magazines, Internet articles, recipes, magazines, scholarly journals, bills, unwanted mail, magazines, report cards, books, magazines....did I mention magazines? We have every good intention of filing our receipts, paying our bills, reading and filing away or recycling magazines, shelving our books and our scholarly journals, putting away music when we're finished with it...and more. All good intentions, but before we know it, life has gotten the best of us, and the two or three things that should be filed and put away have quickly become a pile. And I've been through a lot of piles this week.

My wife may not like it so much when she returns home. Her bills are stacked on the counter, along with mail that has accumulated while she's been gone - but instead of three piles, there is now only one. The piles of magazines on the side tables and on our nightstands have been sorted - some recycled, some filed, and some prepared to go to our offices. The children's schoolwork has been reviewed, nonessential papers and projects sorted, and most of it put away. There is still more to be filed, receipts to be recorded, and more - but I can see the wood top to our desk. It's taken a lot of work, and a lot of drive and steadfastness to accomplish what has been done so far...and I am hoping I have enough of that ambition left to finish this weekend.

We do that a lot with our spiritual lives too, don't we? We have every intention of having focused prayer at a certain time of day. We want to read our Bible, and have devotions, a time of worship, or some other act of praise. We want to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort those who mourn. But, even if our intentions are good, we quickly begin to pile up our hopes for spiritual disciplines, and things get out of hand. We no longer do much of anything - or anything at all.

I recall that, as I prepared to go to seminary, I thought it would be a good spiritual discipline to read through the entire Bible (imagine that, a soon-to-be seminarian who wanted to have read the Bible). Knowing that I would be moving in early August to arrive in time for ordination, I set an ambitious reading schedule of five chapters per day. Well, that was fine when I was reading about Noah and Joseph and Moses....but then I got into the laws of Leviticus and the history of Israel in 1st and 2nd Samuel, and I was finding it more difficult to read five chapters a day. Things would come up, excuses would form, and before you know it, 45 chapters would be waiting to be read. I couldn't get to them; I didn't really want to read them. But I would force myself to sit (for hours sometimes) and catch up, because I felt the discipline was important.

Spiritual disciplines shouldn't be piled up, but they are. You can't make excuses for them; you can't ignore the fact that they're there; you also can't sweep them up into a box when company comes, and forget that they've made their way to the basement. (Interesting that that's how some of the piles ended up in our bedroom - company came!) Thank goodness that praying can't overwhelm us. We don't have to catch up on it, or reading Scripture, or serving those in need. We can pick up at any time...and although Christians are striving to practice their faith constantly...God desires a relationship with us, more than having the i's dotted and the t's crossed in our spiritual discipline. God desires genuine relationship, and sometimes that's messy and sporadic and piled up.

When all is said and done, the piles will go away...and they will eventually return. At the end of the day, I hope that I've invested more time in my relationship with God, as well as with my wife and children, than in having my life be pile-free and perfect by human standards. God will honor my messiness, and call it good.