This is the week after Easter. Our culture has deemed this week to be recognized as “Spring Break.” Well, are you? Or will you disregard its invitation because you are currently caught on an endless treadmill, exerting about every ounce of energy you’ve got, traveling a road at full speed ahead that unfortunately leads absolutely nowhere worth going to?
Why won’t you at least make the time to open your eyes to the signs of rebirth and the delights of this season of new life happening all around you?
Why do we showcase our busyness like it is some kind of badge of honor? Where in the Bible does it say “Tiredness is next to godliness?” Why do we boast about how few days we take off and how little personal time we get for ourselves?
I want you to think about how many conversations you hear that actually start out like this: “Oh, if only you knew how busy this past week was…” Then, before you know it, we get cornered into a game of “Can You Top This?” where the most exhausted person wins the prize?
Hey, even God rested on the seventh day. It says in the Bible in the book of Genesis that after he had finished his work, God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because he rested from the work of creating that he had done.
While I don’t want to get caught up in this article on whether the Sabbath should be on Saturday or Sunday, it does seem to be a principle of Scripture that if we human beings want to stay on the right track, we desperately need a day where God is the main treat. And this is the day and these are the hours where we gain our perspective back and set our priorities straight so that we don’t wake up one morning to find that we have used our lives trying to get ahead only to discover that we have been left very behind of all that matters most.
Nobody I know has ever got to the end of their lives saying, “If only I had spent more time out on the job.”
Spring Break might be the perfect time to make some wise life choices before you end up broken in places that can’t be fixed. Of all the things that we men and women are forced to live with, can you think of anything worse than regret?
In the old Dr. Seuss classic, “The Cat in the Hat,” there is a page where the frolicsome, troublesome cat is pirouetting on a rubber ball while balancing a teetering mountain of stacked objects.
They include a fishbowl on a rake, a tray with a milk jug on his free foot, a cake with a tea cup on his hat, a toy boat in one hand and a tower of books on the other and he holds a Japanese fan in the curled tip of his tail. The cat then boasts that he is capable of even greater feats than these when all of a sudden:
“This is what the Cat said, then he fell upon his head…He came down with a bump, from up there on a ball…And Sally and I saw, we saw all the things fall.”
Is this a suitable metaphor for your life today? Are you waiting for sickness to strip you down? Is the day you will finally wake up be the day that you no longer will be able to get up?
God says that if we don’t take the necessary time to be refueled, He himself would make us lie down in pastures green (Psalm 23:2). God is not impressed when we run ourselves ragged to the point that the light goes out in our eyes and life. God longs for you to pay attention to Him so he can remind you of the gifts of Spring, before you wake up in the chill of an early Fall.
This week, I have decided to practice what I preach. There will still be a million things to do next week. And the way that I am wired, I will be looking to do them. But this week I want the message of Easter to last a little longer and I want God to lead me into the places that life can really be found.
I want to be aware of the precious family that God has given me and make sure that I look into their eyes today because I have no guarantee that I will still have them to love tomorrow.
And because of decisions to break this week- I will be made stronger to last longer in the days ahead, and so will you… I don’t want to sacrifice real treasure in the pursuit of dust.
I suggest that you do the same, so this week the best advice I can give you is, “Take five and stay alive!”
Let Pastor Rudy know what you think by emailing him at pastorrudytlc@comcast.net and check out the church’s new Web site at www.tlccma.org.
