#17 Oswald Chambers Thinks I Am a Slacker

**Disclaimer: The following posts are lessons, tips, tricks, or just things I have noticed since moving to Nashville. I make no promises that this information will be relevant to you at all. In fact, some of the lessons are downright ridiculous. But maybe, just maybe we’ll learn something together.

So.

I am not a morning person. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Sure there have been ‘seasons where I rose early, perhaps went for a jog, sat down in my breakfast nook with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, took a long, leisurely time getting ready for the day.

Ok that’s a lie.

The closest I have come to that is the week after I got back from Kenya and I sat up at 7 on the dot every morning wide awake and ready to roar. So I would walk down to starbucks with my Bible, spend some precious hours praying and thinking and writing.

But that faded as quickly as the jet lag.

And so here I am. A night owl trapped in the body of an adult stuck in a world where the morning really matters. I used to get away with it when I did all freelancing because my hours were my own. I could gloriously be inspired at 1 AM and work until 4, snoozle until 11 or noon and do it all again. Oh how I miss those days. But nowadays I work real jobs, with mostly-real hours and that means I have to come face to face with the mornings and conquer them.

So when I came across these quotes by Oswald Chambers about the morning and spending time with God, I did that cartoon audible ‘gulp’ that the characters do when they know they’re busted.

“If you have ever prayed in the dawn you will ask yourself why you were so foolish as not to do it always: it is difficult to get into communion with God in the midst of the hurly-burly of the day.”

Boom. Roasted.

“It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.”

Ruh-roh.

“Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.“

Aaaaand he sold me on this last one. ‘Fling the door wide back and let God in’? Love that.

And of course I’m not advocating that the only real time to spend with God is in the morning, but for me, right now, this lesson was huge.

What I’m going to do to wrap my life around it? Pending.

LR

You Can't Drink Grapes

Every now and then I stumble across someone who is smarter than me (And by every now and then I mean on an obnoxiously consistent basis)

It clearly goes without saying that Oswald Chambers is one of them.

For quite a while now he has been one of my favorite authors (I about up and started a Church of Oswald after reading his Biography) (Ok that was blasphemous. And a joke)

ANYWAY. I read one of his writings recently that just struck me. And no not just because the analogy involved my love language (wine).

Here are a few choice chunks:

God’s call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. God can never make us wine if we object to the fingers He uses to crush us with.

If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way!

But when He uses someone whom we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, and makes those the crushers, we object. We must never choose the scene of our own martyrdom. If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.

BOOM: ROASTED (my insertion)

We have to be adjusted into God before we can be broken bread in His hands. Keep right with God and let Him do what He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.

Darn you, Oswald.

Hurts so good,

LR

Listening to: I am officially addicted to “24″. But it has crushed any dreams I ever had of becoming a spy.

On My Mind: It looks like VH1 Storytellers in here.