Quick–name three things you use your bathtub for besides bathing…

Did your list include nursing sick chickens?

How about thawing out 300 feet of black garden hose for watering in the morning? (Yeah, welcome to our evening after church last night!)

Welcome to our life–we live where the dirt is.

It tracks in on our boots.

It brushes off our pants and gloves.

It trots back and forth leaving paw prints on scrubbed floors, heading from one adventure to the next.

It gets stepped on, and ground in, and dragged through…and somewhere in the midst of sweeping between the back door and the mudroom door for the four hundredth time, it starts to seep into the cracks and crevices of our hearts.

And you know what grows in that dirt?

Bitterness. Discontent. Frustration (oh, the angry tears!).

Everything that is not joy, hope, faith, and long-suffering.

At prayer meeting last night, the Pastor talked about Acts 28:1-10, and how sometimes the Devil is a serpent that wants to strike at you–that wants to bite you, and fill you with his poison, and leave you for dead. And that our hope is always in Christ and that if we follow Paul’s example (which was just an echo of Jesus’ example!) and pray more and fear less, we can turn the tempest, the trial, into a victory–and He will provide for all our needs.

And I came home and thought about dirt.

And about 300 feet of black water hose heaped in my bathtub.

And about the adversary, the Devil–and how I understand him as a roaring lion out to devour us (1 Peter 5:8), but I don’t always understand him as dirt.

I don’t always understand him as a pile of dirty dishes, or a clogged up septic system, or a child’s bad grade. I don’t understand him as office work that I can’t bring myself to leave at the office.

Yet, when these things bring mud into my spiritual life–fatigue into my home life–they all become tools of the adversary. Much like the viper on Melita, these things can poison our homes and our walk with the Lord–killing our spiritual life and filling our days with bitterness and discontent…

Or they can demonstrate the power of the Lord to work for us, with us, through us, in any circumstance. They can be tools for the devil, or we can be tools for the Lord, like Paul was. Like Jesus.

The Lord’s been laying on my heart some cold, hard, facts about my lack of discernment lately –and how it’s most likely connected the state of my prayer life. I think there’s an inherent danger in having routines for people who love routines–they become routine!  Know what I’m saying?

(Yet another reason Believers should set aside any petty excuses for not attending church regularly–sometimes you don’t know your walk is growing cold until you’re near someone else’s fire for the Lord!)

Let’s lift each other up today! Has the Lord been laying something on your heart lately? Need some prayer? Feel free to email me if you’d rather not share it in the comments!

Happy almost-the-weekend day!!