Am I Sharing The Ups And Downs Of My Spiritual Life With Others?
Our daughter is 2 in a few weeks and her new favourite thing is stringing words together to make the most amazing and surreal sentences. A lot of them are just a jumble of words, but she looks at you so intently as she says it that it must be important in her mind. Every now and then she comes out with a sentence that makes perfect sense and she repeats it for days, sometimes even weeks.
Her latest sentence is “Fire gone! Man came to take fire”. The gas fire in our living room has been removed and it has left a bare plaster patch on the wall. Zoe will often tell us the fire is gone when we come home and she sees that it is missing…but occasionally when we are out and about she will say it out of the blue and we retell the story about the day the man came to take the fire away and filled the hole and left plaster on the wall that will be painted soon.
Matt was telling me about one of those occasions recently and told me that it had made him wonder if we ever feel like the fire is gone? Do we sometimes feel like someone has come and taken our fire and left a bare patch behind? I don’t mean a literal fire but the fire that burns inside us for Jesus. If that is how we feel, what do we do about it? Do we just paint over it and hope for the best or do we go about getting the fire back or reigniting it?
I’m not at all suggesting we need the fire back in our living room – the space is much better now, not to mention the fire wasn’t safe. But in our walk with Jesus if the fire is gone, the worst thing we can do is paint over the bare patch and hope no one will notice. In the gospels we often hear about times when Jesus took himself away to spend time with the Father in prayer, other times he took Peter, James and John to pray with him, or go to a particular place and experience something with him.
We don’t have to retreat in on ourselves and hope no one notices. If we feel the fire is gone the best thing we can do is share that. Share it with God!! He longs to hear from you and he longs to speak back to you. Also, share it with others! As Christians we are made to be in relationship with God and with fellow believers (and of course with others who don’t yet know God). We are not meant to struggle on alone.
The same goes for when everything is going your way and everything is working well! It is great to smile to yourself and sit back and enjoy life but it’s even better if you share that with friends – they can celebrate with you but they can also be encouraged by your testimony of God’s goodness.
Rachel Wright, Inspire Missioner, GB.
