God's Maintanance Plan

One Afternoon an announcement came over our office loud speaker: "Attention, office staff. If you are parked against the fence please move your car." It would have been interesting to watch from a helicopter what occurred next. For a few minutes, a flow of people emerged from the back of the building. Each person got into a vehicle, moved it back three or four feet from its original position, turned off the motor, and disappeared back into the building.

What was the reason for this apparently futile exercise? The yard maintanance crew was working in the peripheral landscaping. They needed our cars out of the way so they could prune the shrubs and clean out the leaves and weeds that had accumulated during the previous fall and winter. When they were through, the beds around our parking lot looked wonderful.
This experience made me wonder, does the lord ever have to clean out " debris "that has accumulated on my internal spiritual landscape? I wondered how many times a seemingly needless shift in my life was actually the Lord moving me out of my place of comfort so He could clean out debris that had collected in my emotions and my reasoning during some winter season of my life.Have I allowed these circumstances to change me in a positive way, or have I just thought,
"This certainly is an inconvenience" ?

While in my teens, I memorized Proverbs 3:5,6, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." When life is flowing smoothly, I may think my heart is fully directed toward the Lord, but when unexpected pressure comes, I often become aware of clatter in my life.debris that can go undetected simply because it " happens," and I don't even realize it is there.

The day I moved our cars, the cleanup project was part of the grooming that our office landscaping receives each year. This annual task is part of the ongoing maintanance of the property. In my life, I think the Lord must have a maintanance schedule too. When He sees an area of need, He knows the best time to go after it .I remember one time when a few hours delay at the start of a trip put me out of sorts for the whole weekend. It was easy for me to put the blame on he initial delay, but the farther I got into the weekend and for a long while afterward, I could feel the pressure of the inner instruction that said, "This an area of your life that needs to change." The delay certainly had been an inconvenience, but the Lord used it in a positive way to show me my own inflexibility.

Another time, I lost my job during an ecomonic recession. Inconvenient? Yes! But out of that experience I learned that God, not my job was my source of sustenance. Then He gave me a better job than I'd had! The mos recent, " Inconvenience" was when I got sick with pneumonia at the beginning of the Portland camp meeting and missed all of the two week convention. During that sickness, I had time to reflect on some things I had been too busy to pay attention to when everything was moving smoothly.
It was not a pleasant experience, but that part of my spiritual landscape needed attention too!

These times of apparent inconvenience are not unique to me. All of us experience them. On that cleanup day when I went to move my car, I was not alone, there was a steady stream of people both before and after me, until all the cars had been moved. It's like that in life to. Our learning times are usually intertwined with the lives of others, and often they lead to benefits for all concerned. Worry and lack of trust in God will rob our spiritual growth, just say careless words, foolish habits, and thoughtless deeds will clutter our spiritual landscape. As the master Caretaker, the Lord knows how to shift the circumstances of our lives so He can bring order to our inner landscapes. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that "He hath made every thing beautiful in His time."
I hope I am allowing Him to do that in my life.

Dixie Guddat is a member of the correspondence staff
at the Apostolic Faith Church Headquarters office in Portland Oregon.