Living Deeply

Living Deeply

Limitations. One of the things the pandemic brought us was limitations. Suddenly, we could not carry on life as we had before. Life was changed. There were restrictions. Stores were closed. We were asked to wear masks whenever we ventured outside of our houses. When we went to church we had to sit a few feet from our neighbor. It was not the same, but “Hey! It was church!”

Life was restricted, compacted, compressed. Families spent much more time together. They invented ways to pass the time. Some played games, some talked more, some engaged in cleaning and organizing that long had been set aside, on the shelf, so to speak.

Lorraine and I were in conversation with a church about doing a concert. Then the pandemic hit and that got put on hold. Our travel has been cut to a minimum, because where would we go?

In my reading this morning I opened a book I have been reading, Run With The Horses, by Eugene H. Peterson. On the whole, it is a deep book, a bit laborious, but filled with great content and real meat. In the time of Jeremiah, after years of warnings about how the nation was living, the nation was captured by Babylon. People were taken from Jerusalem and carried off to Babylon.

So, what was Jeremiah’s message? Stop sitting around feeling sorry for yourself and pining for Jerusalem. Become productive. “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters.” In essence, carry on with life. Make the best of your captivity in Babylon. Live as deeply and thoroughly as possible.

In this new situation, living in a pandemic, I have valuable advice for you: Live as deeply and thoroughly as possible.

What might that mean?

When life is freewheeling, we tend to get careless. We neglect the small things and blow them off as “not important.”

It must grieve the heart of God when we blow off His directives because they are not particularly exciting. Part of living deeply and thoroughly is to pay attention to what He tell us and not discard the tasks we deem unexciting and unimportant.

Listening to a televangelist one day, a bit of wisdom was put out that I have never forgotten: “You wonder why God isn’t giving you new directives, why He is silent. Well, you haven’t done the things He has already told you to do, so why should He give you new directives? Go back and do the things He already told you to do. Then He’ll speak new things to you.”

How many of you have things that God told you do do and you have never done them because you think they are mundane and unexciting? Some of these things sit around for years, and you never get to them.

Perhaps you are not moving forward, because if God gave you something big to do, you would go forward only to have everything fall apart, because the foundation has cracks in it. By cracks, I mean you have not done the foundational, basic tasks. Your platform from which you operate is not complete.

Maybe you are behind on your bookkeeping or you haven’t filed your taxes. So you plunge into a new endeavor, only to discover, “Oh, Oh! I have to do these taxes now when I should be in motion, accomplishing a big, new project.” That upsets the apple cart, because you are now forced to work on too many things at the same time. You now have stress you shouldn’t have had, because you failed to get the basics done before the big, new project hit.

Unfortunately, I have done this sort of thing far too often. I failed to be a plodder, everyday doing the basic and sometimes unexciting tasks needed to have a solid foundation.

Don’t continually put things off until you are pressing up against a solid, drop dead, deadline, a date by which the task has to be done, and you burn the midnight oil, exhaust yourself and find yourself pressing into projects when you are too tired to do them properly.

By the way, I have found that the week between Christmas and New Years is an ideal time to finish up the year’s bookkeeping and taxes. Why wait until you are into the new year? Finish up 2020 so that you can enter into 2021 with a clean slate.

Is this not part of Jeremiah’s directives to the nation in an unnatural setting, namely exile in Babylon?

“Live as deeply and thoroughly as possible,” was his admonition. It’s a good one, is it not?

Wrap up the lose ends, get the bookwork in order, organize your office throw out outdated material, refresh you work environment.

Be diligent, pay attention, get on top of things! What better way to enter into the new year than to enter in organized, alert, intentional, and focused?

Photo taken by George