My friend shared this visual lately of two ways to view your relationship with God.
On one hand, you can think of God as this pool of clear water over there — somewhere you go on occasion, maybe daily, to take a dip. It’s refreshing and cool; it can bring you peace and joy. You, however, spend the majority of your day on the land. That’s where you toil and sweat and do all your hard work. While the daily dips in the pool are a good thing, it’s definitely a separate section of your day.
On the other hand, your relationship with God can be like you in a river. All day, every day. It’s you in the river. The river is all around you and it’s carrying you to the places the river will go.
I like this analogy because it reveals the difference between “adding God to your life” and allowing your whole life to become surrendered to God. I mentioned last week I am tuning into more of these faint whispers of what kingdom-living might look like in the day-to-day.
Kingdom-living is not me doing my life and then finding time on my calendar to go share the Gospel (although being intentional to share the Gospel through scheduling is a good thing!). But it’s not me adding another thing to my already-full schedule.
“Full” meaning it’s full with cutting up fruit to appease the hungry children while I simultaneously try to make lunch. Full with trying to wipe a tiny butt while simultaneously trying to keep a different, tinier kid from putting his hands in the toilet. Full with tidying up all things one! more! time! Full with saying yes to cutting out butterfly wings because my daughter wants to be able to fly and then trying to figure out a way to get them to stick to her back.
Kingdom-living is allowing everything to become about the Kingdom’s King and his purposes. Asking God how he would have me order my whole entire day. And in the midst of this, truly, the small things become the significant things — because when you have an eye for God’s upside-down kingdom, the least things become the most important things. Steps that don’t add provide any additional benefit to your life become valuable because you know it’s what God wants.
Steps that don’t add provide any additional benefit to your life become valuable because you know it’s what God wants.
I love this thought from Bob Goff’s book Everybody Always that we are building a kingdom, not a castle. How easy is it, as we strive to live in the world but not be of the world, to get caught up in building our individual castles?
So much in this life is going to burn. Like literally, at the end of time or at the end of your life, so much of what we are daily making our lives about will no longer matter at all. At the end of your time, what’s going to remain? What will have been kingdom investments when you have passed on into the kingdom of God?
I am studying 1 Thessalonians and Paul’s words to the Thessalonian believers in chapter two struck a cord with me. He said: “Who is our hope or joy or crown of boasting in the presence of our Jesus Christ at His coming? Is it not you?” (1 Thess. 2:19)
Start with the small steps of obedience every day. If I’m not willing to obey God in the small, seemingly insignificant things — why would I be willing to obey him in the larger and harder things?
Scattered in all Directions 