August 22, 2017

Reading time: two minutes.

We’re looking at three warning signs of an imbalanced, unhealthy life for a few weeks.  This week’s topic: Spiritual Wellbeing.

The short definition of a healthy spiritual life that I’ve been working with reads, “As I grow in God’s grace of Spiritual GOODNESS I am finding joy in RECEPTIVITY to His gifts, maturing and growing in Christ.”

There are so many ways to consider this, but I’ve chosen three indicators that I’ve wrestled with over the years, summarized by these three words: daisy, prayer, and distance.

We better unpack those three a little bit.

First off, “daisy” refers to what has been called “Daisy Spirituality.”  It’s the dangerous game of playing, season by season, or even day by day, the old petal-plucking game, “He loves me; He loves me not.”  It’s riding the roller coaster of our emotions, judging our life with God by our current feelings.

Second, you might go through times of having no idea what to pray for.  It’s sitting quietly in the presence of the Lord and having nothing to say, not knowing where to begin.

And third, sometimes it’s possible to believe that God is not very interested in what is happening in my life.  It’s the loss of a recognition of God’s abiding presence, a belief that He is far away and uninvolved in my life.

While these three might seem at first very different from one another, I think at their root they share a common source.  These three are potentially all indicators of a lack of intentional, prayerful time in God’s Word.

Those who regularly turn to God’s Word of promise and hope, with expectancy and a true hunger to hear from God, will significantly smooth out the roller coaster ride of the spiritual ups and downs linked to the ever-changing circumstances of life.  Reading the stories of people just like us who live those crazy up and down lives, shows one constant: the love of God that evens everything out.

I change from day to day.  I’m up and I’m down.  I’m lovable and I’m unlovable, almost moment by moment.  But God’s love for me, affirmed in the Bible’s stories of people just like me, is constant and never-changing.  Time in the Word affirms His never-changing love.

A dry, vacuous prayer life is refreshed and renewed by the Word of the Lord.  Don’t know what to say to God?  Listen to what He has to say to you first!  You likely won’t get farther into His Word than a single verse or phrase before finding something to say back to Him, especially if you begin in the Psalms, our vocabulary of prayer!

And if you ever doubt God’s presence in your life, remember that those Bible stories are your own story.  He’s with you just as He was with Daniel and Esther and Ruth and the people in the wilderness and the widow who lost a son and the broken and the hungry and the lonely and afraid.

Open the Word.  Receive His promise.

Thanks for reading.

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