Being a spiritual sluggard...

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.

Proverbs 13:4

Recently I have been a sluggard in my spiritual life. Circumstances have stripped my of "time to relax" or have kept me up "burning the midnight oil" and I have chosen to sleep in to recover, or at times, simply hide from my responsibilities. I found myself coasting on previously studied truth, or living from Sunday to Sunday, instead of the daily searching of God's Word. I don't know when it started, the slide from regular time in the Word to a complete absence of it, but it happened.

The last couple of weeks I have been feeling pretty down. I have been scrounging for crumbs and coming up with nothing. Sadly, it took a couple of weeks for me to awaken fully to the sad spiritual condition I was in. Thankfully, the Lord sought me out and called me back to "my first love". Monday morning I woke up and ushered Elliott off to work and sat down for time in the Word. I was shocked to find that I spent an hour in Bible reading, Bible study and prayer, it felt like mere minutes. As I was journaling my thoughts, the idea of "one hundred days" kept coming to my mind. One hundred days... one hundred days... one hundred days of daily Bible reading and prayer.

I was so jazzed. But immediately doubts came, remembering the many half-filled journals I have thrown away in discouragement over the last decade. I pushed those thoughts away and prayed to God for perseverance. I read verses in my time in the Word that I was able to use to encourage my kids and my confidence grew.

Then, Tuesday morning came and I overslept. My morning, for a myriad of reasons, went nothing like planned and I struggled to deal cheerfully and lovingly with my children. I cried out to the Lord that He would help me set aside time to keep my commitment. I imagined I would have time during the children's quiet time. Our day ran behind and we were reading aloud during quiet time, then the dinner rush and a meeting for 4-H. Kids in bed and Elliott and I were visiting about our home building project and then, after some time of yawning uncontrollably, we crawled into bed.

But God is gracious, He knows my frailties and weaknesses. The second my exhausted head hit the pillow, my eyes burst open, my mind clear and alert, I remembered my commitment to the Lord to spend one hundred consecutive days in His Word and in prayer. I bounced out of bed, much to the shock of my already sleeping husband, and found my dining room table to be a quiet place to dive into God's Word.

A balm to my weariness, the Gospel. As I am working through the verses in setting up my Child Training Bible, tonight was about the "Gospel: God, Man, Jesus, Now What?".  I was reminded of the sweet repentance of a child who admitted sin which we would never have known about, fruit of his recent conversion. I was spurred on to pray for my other children, entreating the Lord, in His good will and perfect timing, to call each of my children into His family.

So, two days. The first of one hundred. The start to a journey of reclaiming my first love.