September 24 – Neat or Messy?
By Audrey Bauman
Proverbs 14: 4 (NLT)
4 Without oxen a stable stays clean,
but you need a strong ox for a large harvest.”
Well, that’s some interesting advice for us urban folks. So if you have a barn and you don’t keep any animals in it, you can keep it clean and organized. It won’t require much work. However, if you do keep animals in your barn, it’s rather messy – it’s more work but, you do make money.
I suppose another way of looking at it would be keeping animals (especially in Solomon’s day before John Deere created so many wonderful farming machines) is necessary if you are a farmer. Being a farmer without animals would be ridiculous since you wouldn’t be able to do what your occupation needed you to do – but you would have a clean barn and no work.
Doing what we are called to do is often messy, if we really think about it. What does God call us to do? Love Him with all our hearts, minds and souls and love our neighbours as ourselves. If we put our relationship with our Heavenly Father as a priority, and if we put showing God’s love and compassion to our families, neighbours and world – it can get messy.
We may have a messy house because we had to put cleaning aside to meet someone else’s needs. We may have a tighter budget because we realized someone else needed the money more. We may have to apologize because we realized we said or did something that wasn’t really the good thing to say or do. We may be tired because we ended up staying up late listening to a friend’s troubles. We may have just too many things to fit in to our schedule today because we ended up doing errands for someone else. Supper might be macaroni and cheese because we spent the day playing with our kids instead of making a wonderful supper. Maybe we missed our favourite TV show because we realized we needed some time alone with our Bibles and listening to God. Let’s face it – it can be messy.
But we should also remember Solomon’s advice. Messy brings in the real profit.
Our song for today is Helping Hand by Gloryfall.