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Care Instructions for a Life Worth Living
Duration: 365 days
Spiritual A.D.D.
When people move into a new home, they generally have a list of things they must repair or remodel because the sight of them is intolerable. Five years later, they may still have the same list, but the lack of repair doesn’t bother them anymore.
One of the greatest challenges in life is fighting what might be called spiritual habituation. We simply drift into acceptance of life in spiritual maintenance mode. We rationalize it because we think, “I’m not involved in major scandalous sin. I haven’t done anything to jeopardize getting into heaven. I’m doing okay.” And we forget that Jesus never said, “I have come that you might do okay.” Okay is not okay. We have a kind of spiritual attention deficit disorder that God will have to break through.
When life is on spiritual autopilot, rivers of living water do not flow through it with energy and joy. Instead it looks like this:
- I yell at my children.
- I worry too much about money or my job.
- I get jealous of people more successful or attractive than I.
- I use deception to get out of trouble.
- I pass judgment on people, often when I am secretly jealous of them.
In Genesis 28, God sent Jacob a dream at Bethel. So why doesn’t he send us all dreams every night? Why doesn’t he make every day a rainbow day and send epiphanies twenty-four-seven? Maybe it’s because God wants us to learn to see him in the ordinary rather than be dependent on the extraordinary. Maybe it’s because if God regularly satisfied our demand for special effects it would be like a mother who inadvertently trains her children to pay attention only when she raises her voice. Maybe the reason God lowers his voice is so we will learn to pay attention.
Maybe ordinary days aren’t “ordinary” at all, but part of the required course to develop wonder-filled eyes and praise-fluent tongues.
Perhaps our capacity to pay attention to God — like the capacity to lift weights or speak Spanish — only gets stronger when it gets exercised.
Walk through yesterday in your mind with God, asking where he was present and at work in each scene. Start with the moment when you woke up … what were your first thoughts? Then go on from one scene to the next through your day. What patterns are emerging?
Look and listen to see how God is speaking to you through these daily scenes.
© 2014 by Zondervan. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Visit JohnOrtberg.com for more about John Ortberg's work and ministry.