Avoiding a "shift!"

 As of Monday, it’s technically Fall. I know that you probably agree with me that it doesn’t seem like it has made much of a difference in regard to weather and temperature, but despite how it feels, we are moving on to Fall. I was thinking about it the other day when I was lamenting the heat, and I remembered how last Winter seemed to drag on FOREVER. It took so long for it to finally warm-up and for Spring to feel like it was really here. And Summer even stayed pretty mild for a while. I remember some fairly pleasant weeks in June, and even one in July where we seemed to get a break from the intense, normative Arkansas summer temperatures.

While climate change is super-important, I’m not educated enough on that topic to address it here. (Other than to say that our planet is a resource that is God-given, and it’s our job to care for it and for others.) It seems that all of the seasons have shifted their start dates to a few weeks (or even a month) later than normal. We don’t really seem to notice until a significant event (a holiday for instance) occurs, and then we complain about how it shouldn’t still be this hot, or cold, or rainy—not on Halloween, or Easter, or Thanksgiving!

However, I do think that it’s a pretty common occurrence in our society to see this same level of shift in regard to many aspects of life. For instance, we make a plan and start going to the gym every day, and then that quickly becomes only weekdays, then we decide we also need to take Wednesdays off, because they are super-busy and we need a break. Before you know it, our gym bag is in the trunk, and we don’t remember when the last time was that we went. (Just me??) It can be the gym, it can be keeping up with chores, or how often we need to call our mom, or a million other things, but we (or I) seem to start in one place, and before we know it, end up somewhere very different, with little awareness of how we arrived.

 I think that we as followers of Christ can also get into this easily-obtained shift. Apply it to Bible study, prayer, church attendance—you name it. While we know that our standing with Christ is NOT about performance, or what we do or don’t do, there is an aspect of closeness in the relationship that we want to attain. And, like it or not, all relationships involve a certain amount of effort. Even our relationship with God, the one being we know will never leave us—our intimacy even in that relationship can dwindle when we are not keeping up with it. I think we can all think back to times in our life when we felt closer and further away from God. If we think it through, we can also probably admit that the more distant times were the ones where we were neglecting to give that connection the energy that it deserved.

So, what do we do? How do we stop the momentum of a downward shift from knocking our relationship with God off-kilter? It seems to me, the best way we combat this slide is to take honest, periodic assessments. Take time to answer one of John Wesley’s favorite questions, “How is it with your soul?” If your soul is weary, or seems far away or disconnected, vow to spend some time and energy making things right. We can’t control all of the things that we will encounter in a day, but I do believe we can all devote at least a small amount of time and mental energy (even if its while driving, showering, or cooking) to commune with God. The more often we make those small course corrections, the more likely it is that we remain closer to the place we want to be.

Our hope in all of this, however, is the promise that God is constant and unchanging. Even if things seem out-of-sorts on our end, they never are with God. There’s an old saying (that I’m pretty sure I first saw on a cross stitch at my Grandma’s house) that reminds us if we are feeling distant from God, we are the one who moved. James 1:17 reminds us that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” So, while all Earthly relationships depend on the changing efforts of two people, and how they are able to close the distance created by two,  we can trust that God is always right where God has always been. God doesn’t move, so we can know that we are already halfway to where we want to be. And even if we feel like our efforts today didn’t get us to where we want to be, there is tomorrow. While we aren’t necessarily promised a tomorrow on Earth, we do have eternal promises that keep us even closer to God.

May our shifting being small, may our distance be little, and may the fervor for our intimacy with God be renewed daily.