Spiritual Snickers Bars
A pastor's wife, Teri, had spent a busy afternoon cooking and cleaning in preparation for dinner guests and had completely missed lunch in the process. Deciding to take the edge off her hunger with her hidden stash of Snickers bars, she ate a couple of them and still had two hours time to shower,do her hair, and get dressed for her dinner party. At dinner she discovered her problem. " There I was with that wonderful dinner I'd worked all day to prepare, but my appetite was gone!" Her snack had taken away her mid-afternoon hunger pangs but she ended up only picking at her plate while everyone else dug in and enjoyed their meal. "The Lord spoke to me at that moment,"Teri says. "He showed me that we often fill our lives with spiritual Snickers bars- things like friends, books, and shopping. They may be good things,completely innocent things-but not when they take the edge off our hunger for God."
Says the author, "I constantly fight the tendency to fill the God-shaped hole he created in me with fluffy stuff...I don't like loneliness....I don't like quietness, so I fill up the silence with sitcoms, and talk shows, Christian music and CNN- but it was in the quiet of the night that Samuel heard God's voice." You might want to consider what activities you are using to fill the empty places of your life. What's taking the edge off of your hunger for him?"
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I can well relate to this passage. I find myself with a lot empty time on my hands lately. In the process of getting my house ready to be on the market, I filled my time with painting, de-junking, pre-packing and storing, cleaning and rearranging furniture, buying things to enhance the decor of my living space. Now all that remains is a "show house" that is pretty much clean and clutter-free. It is also devoid of all my music CDs , my CD player, and tv. No, I didn't get rid of the tv, but in the process of trying to save money on my cable-internet service, we cut the cable and were going to sign up as a new customer to get the lower rate, but we would then have to sign up for a specific time period contract. Unwilling to do that, we decided that internet was the most important so we have no cable. And having old tv's in the house and no converter signal box for our analog tv's means that we have no tv service. Yeah, it's pretty boring around here.
At first, I basked in the quietness of having nothing to do all day. I caught up on Facebook and e-mails. I even sent a handwritten letter to my best friend for her birthday. Then I started staying up late, and sleeping in. I didn't want to get out of my pj's some days. I started to find myself getting depressed and lonely. My husband is gone 5 nights a week and sometimes over the weekends if he has work to do in Des Moines and Allison decided to move to Iowa early and start college there. Since then , Kat has decided to move to Iowa early and get her residency established for the Spring semester. Bex is taking on more hours at Taco Bell in Morton so even as we share living space and a car together, I am seeing less of her these days. I knew the empty nest would happen sooner or later, but I'm getting a taste of it sooner than I fully expected to.
I have accountability partners who are praying for me as I asked them to , that I would find wise ways of filling up my time so that I wouldn't become depressed. I believe God is answering those prayers in a mighty way. I read this passage in the above-mentioned book for my Friday morning Mom's summer Bible study. I read it last year, but this year have benefited by savoring each chapter, underlining and discussing weekly with other sisters in the Lord. I was struck yesterday with the Spiritual Snickers bars section because it so paralleled my own journey lately. God has intentionally stripped away all that could possibly have filled my time and distracted me from Him, to bring me to the point of needing Him most. Thank you, accountability partners and fellow Christ-followers, for praying for me!
I am being more intentional in my Bible reading each morning, and spending more time reading my Bible study chapters for summer Bible study. I am pressing in during the quiet moments of each day instead of turning on a DVD or reaching for a radio, or getting on Facebook and playing my favorite game (Solitaire-how apropos). In those moments God has been sharing insights with me. Let me share just one from this past week:
In Jeremiah, the prophet is sent to speak a difficult and unpopular message to the exiles in Babylon- build houses and plant crops because you're going to be there a long while- 70 years to be exact. Don't listen to the prophets there who are telling you that you are going back and that your king will save you because God didn't send them; they are lying to you. God sent you there to PRESERVE you as a remnant. The people who got to stay in Jerusalem with their puppet king are all going to die of the sword, pestilence and famine!
God spoke to me in that moment about His moving me back to Iowa. You have to know, that I really H.A.T.E. moving! This will be the 9th time we have moved since I got engaged to my husband. Once was getting married, once was our first house, once was because of a financial setback, but 6 of them have been job-related! In these last few moves, I have been very resistant to the point of stressing out my husband. I don't like change. I am perfectly happy settling somewhere and digging in deep roots and making friends, establishing a support network. I hate the work involved in moving from the stuff I did pre-marketing of the house all the way through the showing and selling, the packing and moving, to the unpacking and rearranging of my life. I don't like notifying doctors, and collecting records and filling out all the release forms for each member of the family times the number of doctors and dentists and orthodontists we have. It seems like too much sometimes. But then those verses came back and God spoke to me and said, "Tracy, I am moving you so that I can firmly establish you -so you can continue on your walk with Me. What lies behind here for you is death and destruction for your spiritual life, but what lies ahead is much better." I could choose to put my foot down and just tell Russ I'm not moving, but at what cost to me spiritually? Isn't is much better to be in God's will for me instead of my own will for me? What must have seemed like a terrible punishment to those exiles (and it really WAS a punishment) was also God's way of preserving them as a nation. Can you get that? A sinful, prideful and terribly brutal nation was in fact, preserving the nation of Israel! So I am choosing to look differently at this move back to my roots. I can't wait to see how God will cause me to flourish in my new/old surroundings. How will He grow me? What ministry area has someone been praying for me to fill? What people does God want to send me to for accomplishing His will in their lives? And what new things does God want to teach me that require a different scenery? I'm game now.
~Tracy 
