This is the time of year when many people engage in what is commonly called “spring cleaning.” Garages are swept out, decks are power washed, and windows get cleaned. The longer hours of daylight allow for us to freshen up flower beds, removing the leaves and debris that accumulated in them over the winter, getting them ready for the planting of new flowers. We had our lawn reseeded last fall and on Saturday I raked up some of the remaining straw that did not biodegrade during the winter months. Believe it or not, I enjoy doing (most) yard work.

Dandelions are sprayed with weed killer, but tomorrow ten more appear. Did you know that technically dandelions are not weeds, they are part of the aster family of flowering plants (think zinnias, sunflowers, marigolds). And did you also know that dandelions produce seeds without pollination, thus the offspring plant is genetically identical to its parent plant; a process known as apomixis. So, how many dandelions does it take to eventually cover your entire yard? The answer: just one.

We don’t just spring clean outside; we also do the same inside our homes. Winter clothes are replaced in closets by warm weather clothes, windows are cleaned, and the boxed-up Christmas decorations that have been sitting in the spare bedroom are finally put away in the attic. You might even have a garage sale or donate items to a local charity.

And not only do we need to do spring cleaning to our homes and yards, it is a good idea to look in the mirror and spring clean those areas in our lives that have gotten neglected, cluttered, avoided, abused, unbalanced, or put in a box but never really put away. What I am saying is that life for most of us is hectic and occasionally out of control. We are in seemingly always in survival mode, frequently causing us to fail taking care of the things that are important, both our inside and outside our home as well within ourselves. This is a good time to take inventory of your life and make changes where they might be needed. Some of those changes will be easy and quick, other might take longer periods of time, maybe even being painful.

The Bible gives us a roadmap to a better tomorrow. That roadmap begins and ends with asking God to make you more like Him. Psalm 139 begins with David acknowledging that God has examined his heart, and that He knows everything about David. In fact, nothing about David or his life is hidden from God. We read in Psalm 139:1-4 – “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you Lord, know it completely.”  

The psalm ends with David’s prayer for God to examine him and point out what needs spring cleaned. In verses 23-24 we see these words – “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” 

What areas do you need “spring cleaned” or maybe totally jettisoned like the solid rocket boosters from a spaceship after liftoff? God is ready to help you spring clean your life. Ask Him today to not only examine your life, but also your soul, and then with His help get to work on spring cleaning.

We all like those places of safety. As a child, the first place you probably wanted to run to when you were afraid was into your parent’s arms. Those big arms wrapped around you offered a safe haven in the face of fear. As a young boy, my friends and I built hideouts out of plywood, dirt and tree branches, and without the secret password nobody could enter our fort. We were safe from the neighborhood girls.

Most of us today consider our house a safe place. The metal, wood, brick, concrete, stone, and asphalt offer us a measure of safety that isn’t found in hideouts made by boys. We can regulate the thermostat to a comfortable temperature while outdoors it could be 100 degrees or below freezing. We are told that the safest place during extreme weather events such as tornadoes and hurricanes is in the basement or an interior room without windows. Not only do our homes provide protection, most of us agree with Dorothy Gale, “There’s no place like home.”

But, while our homes do provide us with some measure of safety and security, we also know that they need regular upkeep and maintenance, along with the occasional major repair, in order to not become dilapidated and unsafe. Even with proper upkeep, our homes at times let us down, they fail to be safe places. Have you ever seen a tree fall on a house? Did the roof or the tree win?     

On the contrary, in Jesus we have a safe place that will never let us down. The Bible calls Jesus our dwelling place, our safe shelter. Psalm 118:8 tells us, “It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in humans.” Psalm 91 is a beautiful testimony to the security we have when we trust in God. I encourage you to read this psalm in its entirety; today I offer you just four verses:

“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the LORD, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust’” (vv. 1-2).

[In these two verses we see four different names for God – Elyon (Most High), El Shaddai (Almighty), YHWH/Yahweh/Jehovah (LORD), and Elohim (my God, plural: Father, Son, Holy Spirit). These names reveal to us that (1) God is elevated above all else, the sovereign ruler, (2) He is the all-powerful One, our sufficiency, (3) YHWH is God’s personal name, the self-existent One, first revealed to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, and (4) that He is the Creator, found in Genesis 1:1.]

“If you say, ‘The LORD is my refuge,’ and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overcome you, no disaster will come near your tent” (vv.9-10).

To be clear, those verses do not say that bad things will never happen (read John 16:33), but rather, they do say that Jesus is your safe haven in both good times and in bad times.

I will end with these hopeful words, found in Psalm 46:1-3 – “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”  

So, I ask you today, where are you putting your trust – in the dilapidating things of man or in the safe and secure shelter of the Most High?

We all know people who always seem to be in a rush. They run from thing to thing, as the saying goes, like a chicken with its head chopped off. Did you ever wonder where that saying originated? After a chicken is decapitated, the adrenaline in its muscle tissue briefly causes the chicken to convulse, thereby the bird flaps its wings wildly, giving it the appearance of running around. We use that statement today to describe someone who is in a frenzied state.

How about the person who never appears to be in a hurry? They are the person who is always late to the party, the person who drives ten miles per hour under the speed limit, and that person you want to light a fire under to get them to move faster.

We are a society that no longer wants to wait for anything. We have no patience for waiting.

At the 1933 World’s Fair, Westinghouse introduced a shortwave radio transmitter than cooked food between two metal plates. Thirteen years later, Raytheon unveiled something called the microwave oven. However, it wasn’t until the late 1960s that this appliance became affordable to the general public, allowing households to dramatically reduce the time it took to heat food and water. Now today, for many of us, that two minutes it takes to pop popcorn seems like an eternity. Think about how we communicate with people these days. With emerging technology and the many social media platforms, communication that used to take days if not weeks is now immediate. And be honest, most of the time we have no patience for slow replies.  

That same philosophy of “I want it now” carries over into our view of how God operates. When we ask Him for something, we want it right now. For example, if you are unemployed and you are looking for a job, most likely each morning you pray for God to help you in your job search. For many, what that really means is “God, help me get a job right now!” That is not a bad request, but at least for me, when my “I want it now” timetable isn’t immediately met by God, I get upset and frustrated. Maybe you do too. If you are honest, whatever it is that you have been praying for and the days or weeks or months have gone by, you begin to wonder where God is and why He seems to be taking His good old time.

God is never early. He is never late. God is not constrained by the time limits we tend to put on Him. In 2 Peter 3:8 we read this, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” We see things through finite eyes; God sees things through infinite eyes. God sees the whole of life; we on the other hand, have very limited vision. Two things grow us in our faith, and neither are places we enjoy residing. Those two things are pain and waiting, and often they go hand in hand. Ecclesiastes 8:6 gives us this warning, “For there is proper time and procedure for every matter, though a person may be weighed down by misery.”

I am not minimizing the struggles you might be experiencing today. Many of you are facing real hardships and time seems to be running out. He keeps His promises and He always shows up. Maybe not how or when you expect, but He does always show up. What I want you to hear is that God is with you in your struggles. He is instructing you to wait for strength (Isaiah 40:31), wait for direction (Proverbs 3:5-6), and wait for provision (Psalm 62:5).

So today, “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage, for the LORD” (Psalm 27:14).

Now that the weather is turning warmer and the sun sets later in the evening, picture yourself sitting on your back porch on a nice spring evening enjoying a glass of wine while listening to the birds sing, the breeze gently whistling through the leaves, and the clapboards on the old barn down the lane creaking. It is lovely and relaxing evening. Suddenly everything goes quiet. It gets eerily calm; the birds stop singing, the leaves are no longer rustling, and the clapboards hang silently. Lightning flashes in the sky. Soon a storm does appear on the horizon, dumping buckets on rain on what was just a few minutes ago a nice peaceful evening.

The atmosphere does truly change before a storm. Storm clouds pull in warm moist air from all around as the storm builds. This air travels up through the clouds and then back down again. On the way down this air becomes warmer and drier, and as warm stable air spreads over an area it makes the rest of the air stable as well, thus the “calm before the storm.”

This calmness, this stillness, often brings us a period of tranquility, a sense of peace. There is peace in stillness. The Bible talks of us finding peace in our moments of stillness. Your body needs down time to rest and re-charge, and your soul needs times of silence and quietness, a time to quiet all other sounds, in order to hear God’s voice. God sometimes speaks in loud tones, but most often He speaks to us in gentle whispers (see 1 Kings 19:9-12).

In a world full of noise, it is really hard to hear God’s voice if you do not build times into your daily routine to dial down and simply be at rest. Psalm 46:10 tells us that we are to “be still and know that I am God.” And among other things, Isaiah 30:15 tells us that “in quietness and trust is your strength.”      

Just as that quiet falls upon nature, we too need to allow a quiet to fall upon our lives. If you want to hear God, you need to build into your life a rhythm of silence and quietness.

So, I ask you today, are you intentionally building times of silence and quietness into your schedule?

Yesterday morning the pond that is the water hazard on the golf course hole on which we live was perfectly still. There was no water movement at all. I could see a perfect reflection of the trees and if I would have gazed into the still waters, I would have been able to see a near perfect reflection of my face. The mirror you looked into this morning as you brushed your teeth, it too reflects your image.

Water and mirror reflectance are called specular reflection, because the light is reflected in one direction off those smooth surfaces, whereas diffuse reflection coming off rough surfaces tends to reflect light in numerous directions. And both water and mirror images are virtual images, as opposed to real images, because the light rays only appear to emanate from the object. Real images on the other hand are actual light rays coming from an object and being projected upon another (such as a cinema screen). In one way, mirror images differ from water images. In a vertical mirror, the top and bottom of the image remains the same while the left and right sides are reversed. Looking at the reflection created by water, just the opposite. The top and bottom images are flipped while the left and right remain the same. See the picture in this post.

Solomon, the writer of Proverbs, and the wisest man to ever live (1 Kings 3:11-15) wrote this in Proverbs 27:19 – “As water reflects the face, so the heart reflects the person.”

David, after being confronted by the prophet Nathan about his adulteress affair with Bathsheba, and conspiring to have her husband killed as a coverup, said this in Psalm 51:10 – “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a right spirit in me.”

You might be saying that you have the power to cure what ails your heart. But we are told that our hearts are incurable (Jeremiah 17:9) … incurable outside the power of God.

David knew that – “Create in me a pure (clean) heart.” The Hebrew word used here is “bara’.” It means to create, shape or form. You say that makes sense; I can do that. I can “bara’” my own clean heart. Yes, we can do our part by being careful about what we do, what we say, who not so fast. Le hang out with, what we watch and read, on and on. But let’s look at the Hebrew word used in this context for “create.”

This word “bara’” is used over 50 times in the Old Testament. In every single case, God is the subject; meaning He is the one doing the creating. We see that same word in Gen 1:1 – “In the beginning, God created (bara’) the heavens and earth. In v.27 we are told that “God created (bara’) man in his own image; he (bara’) him in the image of God; he (bara’) them male and female.” This kind of creating is a divine creating; meaning it is God who initiates a clean heart in us.

So, today and tomorrow, and every day after that, will you make this your desperate plea – Oh God, help me guard my heart, and please, by only what only you can do, create (bara’) in me a clean heart, a pure heart, making my spirit right!

When you look into the mirror or the water, what reflects back?

You have probably heard, or even used, one of these two phrases – “The glass is half full” or “The glass is half empty.” If the glass is filled to 50% capacity is it half empty or is it half full? That rhetorical question is often a litmus test of a person’s perspective on a certain situation or circumstance. What you see as half full someone else might view as half empty, or vice versa. A person with a “half full” perspective generally has cause for optimism, and conversely, “half empty” often implies a pessimistic outlook.

To look at it another way, let’s turn to football. When does a punter come onto the field? The punter is most often called upon when the offense has failed to gain ten yards on three attempts. So, on fourth down, the punter takes a snap from the center and punts to ball to the opposing team, hopefully taking away their field position advantage, or better yet, pinning them deep in their own end. The punter on my college football team used to occasionally run with the ball to try and gain a first down instead of kicking it to the other team. That drove our coaching staff crazy but George would run off the field and say, “Coach, even though it was 4th and 20, I saw a first down!” Now that is definitely a glass half full mindset!

[As a side note, he was a three time all-conference selection, one of the best and most consistent punters in the league.]

The Bible tells us that we should sing to the Lord whether we face 2nd down and 1 yard to go or 4th and 20. Psalm 104:33 says this, “I will sing to the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.” Psalm 47:6 puts it like this, Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. And in the Book of Acts (16:25) we read that when Paul and Silas were in prison – that certainly would be cause for a half empty point of view – they were praying and singing, and guess what, other prisoners were listening.   

The Westminster Catechism puts it this way – “Man’s chief aim is to glorify God, and to fully enjoy him forever.” We worship not based upon how we feel. We worship because God is worthy of our praise (Psalm 86:9: Rev 4:11).   

So, I ask you today, what is it in your life that has a grip on you? What is it that is zapping your joy? What is it that is causing you to want to punt on 4th and 20? You might not be able to change your circumstances, but you can change your outlook. Worshipping every day, whether you feel like it or not, will change you and it will change those around you.

And remember this, even if your glass if half empty, it is also half full!

[As a postscript, sadly, George died in 2013 after a long and courageous battle with cancer, and even on his death bed, as cancer had eaten away his body and he only had hours to live, George still had a glass half full mindset, he still saw a first down possible, even at 4th and 20. The last time I talked to George was only days before he died and he ended the call with these words, “Dave, thank you for your friendship, it means a lot to me.” I replied, “No, George, thank you!” Love you and miss you ol’ #42!]