Okay I'm re-learning. Or rather, re-initiating.
Sometimes I go to the gas station and pull up to the tank, and I notice that the person who fueled up before me has put $1 or $3 into the tank. For some reason, putting one gallon of fuel in the tank actually catches more of my attention than $75. It kinda makes me...sad. I know in these tough economic times that dollars are more difficult to come by maybe than anytime in recent memory. And so for the person who's just left this tank, perhaps they've indicated by their purchase that really life for them right now is an exercise in just getting by, an exercise of just making it one more step, one more day.
Don't get me wrong. We all have days like that. Days where if we can just make it back to our head on our pillow at the end of the day accomplishing emotional or relational or work survival, that will be a victory. But the truth is, we all probably have fewer of those days than we want to acknowledge. At some point, there's got to be more in the tank than what it takes for just one day. Sometimes we have to fill the car beyond the point where the low fuel indicator light actually goes off. We need more than a day's worth of fuel.
Here's the reason for my metaphor. I used to be a voracious reader (or at least in my own mind). I felt like I was filling the tanks all the time. And so the intellectual seeds God was sowing were bringing lots of cool harvest potential. But in the last few months, (probably about a year now) the discipline of sowing had basically dried up. Sure I'd do a little reading every once in a while (just enough to get my intellectual tank off the pegged "E") but not nearly enough to have time for what was sown to actually grow into something bigger. It's like eating the seeds instead of putting them into the ground. You get by for one more day but you really have nothing in the hopper for the days and months ahead.
And my schedule basically had no time for the discipline of refilling the tanks. So today, I've made the decision to rework my schedule and create planting space through reading. It may mean that a few things that ordinarily might get done Monday morning jump to the afternoon. But I am realizing that if I don't refill on Monday, the rest of the week is spent hopping from one splash and go to another, which kills my efficiency and probably short circuits God's preparing me for the rest of the week.
For me right now, empty tanks mean more reading. What about for you? What's on E in your life? Actually the bigger question might be, "what's on E that you need to take regular time to get closer to F?" We all have days when a little splash and go is all we can muster, but I can tell you from personal experience, you do that more than a week or two and that habit will lock itself in much quicker than you ever could imagine. And that will be to your detriment as well as to the people around you.
Map out time this week to take steps toward a fill up.
