Living Above The Norm

Procrastination can be a tough thing to overcome, especially when it comes to our spiritual life.  After all, we have time to fix that, right?  Or better yet, “I’ve got some other things I need to get right before I deal with that.“  What’s worse is that often times when we do start to address those areas in our lives and actually deal with that thing the Lord has put His finger on, it seems that the situation actually gets worse before it gets better.  Frustrated and caught off guard it can be easy to want to quit.  Before you do, I think you should listen to this:

There’s a Snake in the Room

Imagine sitting with me in my living room, completely unaware that there is a snake under my big, leather man-chair (that’s right, I said man-chair).  We could go days without knowing it.  It would likely be docile and not do us any harm because it is content to cohabit, leaving us alone as long as we’ll leave it alone.  Suppose one day that we finally get around to rearranging the furniture.  It’s only when we start to make these major changes that we even realize that there’s a snake in the room.  At first, it will likely move to another area.  We might even be able to change our plans and not rearrange the living room as much as we intended – all to avoid confronting the snake. But we’ll have to live with the knowledge that he’s there.

For some, that’s ok; that’s all they will ever obtain.  For God, it’s not good enough.  The snake is there, it has to be dealt with.  As we try to catch the snake he’ll back into a corner; as he runs out of options, he’ll start to fight back.  Its ugly, a little embarrassing, and dangerous.  “What will life be like without the snake?”  We might even wish we could go back to the way things were before God asked us to rearrange everything and exposed the snake.  “Things were better then.” It’s like things have gotten worse when they were supposed to get better.

Don’t Give Up

Now, more than ever, is not the time to quit.  These steps are helping you corner and kill some of the snakes in your life. By becoming proactive in your spiritual life, the Lord is using those tools (people, pastors, situations, circumstances) to corner the snake and it is starting to fight back.  That’s why you feel like it’s worse now than it used to be before you started to deal with that area in your life.  On one hand its scary because it feels like a battle you didn’t ask for; on the other its exciting because you know the thing needs to die and now you’ve got more of a chance to kill it than ever before.

Hang in there. You’ve been given the victory. All you have to do now is walk it out. Don’t cohabit with the snakes in your life once you know they are there.