Living In Light Of Eternity

In a normal afternoon, going about normal life, I had a thought.
A thought that stopped me in my tracks
and made my heart hurt for the conviction it sent to my soul.
For all the stuff I know, even the stuff I write about on this blog, why do I so easily pull my eyes away from the eternal?
Oh, not totally, really. But as I was folding clothes yesterday I thought, "How much time have I spent today preparing for Heaven?"
Every day we should be more prepared. Pressing forward. Walking ahead.
But some days....some days I get caught up in the stuff of life.
I get so distracted by "stuff". There's "have to" stuff, and"living life" stuff, (but that's not the "stuff" I'm talking about here)  some of it is just stuff.
Like email. Facebook. A good book.
Blogging.
While okay in it's place, if it's distracting for our preparation for eternity, it's not okay.
And it makes me sad.
I stood there with a shirt in my hand, just staring. Thinking. Praying.
Oh, Lord, help me do all the things of life for Your glory. And the things that distract from You- The things that pull me away, help me keep them in their place. Help me not to give them a higher value than I ought to. Help me to value only You and what You have given for me to care for.
Forgive me, Lord, for being so prone to wander. Forgive me for letting the distractions win today.
Draw me back to Yourself.
And when I wander again, as I know I will, help me to quickly hear Your voice calling me back and help me to listen, no matter how strong the tug to give into the other things that draw me.
Thank You that eternity is mine. Help me to live my day in light of that fact because someday You are coming back and I want You to find me waiting with anticipation, not watching out for my own temporal desires.
I long for the day I see you face to face- Amen

As I finished with the laundry I continued to think about how easily we allow our focus to be driven away. We don't mean to let it happen, but it just sort of does.

Just for the record,
I'm not saying we should give up things we enjoy and I'm not saying we should set with our knees glued to the floor and our eyes looking at the clouds just waiting for Him to come back.
Far from it actually.
We need to get up and live. Live abundantly. Live fully. And live it for His glory.
We can live abundantly and fully in the daily-ness of life. When we live in His abundance and are full of praise for all that He has abundantly given us to enjoy- When we live out our days in the fullness of Christ's plan for us- That brings God glory. (Yes, even folding clothes!)
We can enjoy life Laugh, do our hobbies, be silly. Do things we like to do. As long as they are in their place, not above Christ or our time with Him and as long as they point towards Him. We can make Him the center of our fun, too!
We can live full of joy in all the ups and downs of life- in happiness and hard times.( Because joy isn't based on circumstance, but on Christ and our trust in Him to control all the ups and downs. And when we learn this, we rise above all the temporal good and bad to find the hope of life in eternal glory.)
We can live a life of learning about Him and fellowshipping with Him in our time alone with Him and then get up and act out what we learn in those times.
We can be Christ's ambassadors as we go about life. When we live our life in the way Christ would have us to, we are showing Christ to others. We are helping others to see who He is through us. And then, as they see the joy of living for Him in us, we extend the gospel message to them so that they may know Him too and start preparing for Heaven themselves.
We can live a life that is pleasing to Him in our home and when we are out and about. At all times.
Making a reality out of what we say we believe, smack dab in the middle of where we are.
It's....
Growing in Godliness. Growing in spiritual maturity.
That's preparation. That's pressing toward home.
That's what God wants to see us doing when He returns.
But....
That's hard to do when we are so wrapped up in our cares, our desires, our thoughts, that we don't crack open the Bible all day.
Hard to do when we care more about what our friends have to say on facebook than what He has to say to us each day.
Hard when we are more interested in how our book ends than how our life will end.
Hard when we talk to others and not Him. When we read other things, and not His words.
When we do what we want, for our enjoyment and not what He wants, for His glory...
When we do these things, we are focusing on the temporal.
And it happens far too much in my life. And it struck me in such a way that I honestly lost my breath a little bit.
Oh, that my desire would be for so much more!
Hebrews 12:1 says-
let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, (KJV)
I pray that God will show me more and more what are the weights in my life.
The things that are hindering me from running full speed ahead toward the goal.
I want to cast them off, the things that so easily snare me, even without me knowing it sometimes, and RUN.
Keeping the end in sight with only a passing glance to what is right now.
I pray that as God shows me what the weights are, I won't hesitate to lay them down.
I pray that the prize at the end of the race will look so much better to me than any silly thing I hold to here, that I'll toss it like a hot potato and not look back.
Heaven is the prize. And it's a guarantee.
Whether we are holding on to the temporal or hitching up our britches and running the race with all we've got, we are going to cross the line into eternity.
It's a given. A promise. A sure thing.
It's more sure than our next breath. More of a guarantee than the surest bet on the planet.
And I PRAY that God will help me EVERY DAY to live with my skirt hiked and feet a flyin' toward the finish line and not sitting around picking pretty flower on the sidelines.
With Jesus in my heart, I am assured Heaven either way, but oh the joy of knowing He found me pressing forward, not moseying along watching the scenery.
I want Him to KNOW I am excited about the Heaven He has for me.
Does He know that about you?
Since Heaven is the surest promise in the world, are you living like it?
If you are guaranteed ten million dollars to do something, and promised help to do that thing, you'd do it right? You'd do whatever it took.
Heaven is an absolute guarantee. And it's better than ten billion dollars. And you have been promised much help along the way.
It's time we live in that guarantee.
Let's start laying aside some weights-
The things that distract us, The things that keep us from a life of more Godliness.
No matter how much we treasure that "stuff", no matter how much value we think it has or how worthy or pleasurable it is, when we stand with our foot just inside eternity- how much value will it have then?
When we let the world's distractions keep us from building treasures in eternity, we are spending our time building cardboard treasure boxes with cheap plastic gold pieces inside that will blow away like chaff in the wind. And then where will be our value?
Oh that we would all spend more time building up our heavenly treasure, which nothing can destroy.

May that be our daily focus and desire.