I'm way too much like Martha!

Over the last few months, I've been reading a book by Joanna Weaver. It's one of those books that I'm taking forever to get through. It's been fabulous. It's been very worth reading, but I find myself putting it down and picking it up randomly and over a long period of time. The title is: Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World.

The basis of the book is summed up in the subtitle: Finding Intimacy with God in the Busyness of Life.

Joanna Weaver describes the Mary & Martha story found in Luke 10:38-42. Martha is the busy bodied sister that makes all the preparations for Jesus and his disciples as they come to visit her home. She's too distracted by the To Do's to stop adn focus on the Lord. Mary, on the other hand, is the sister who sees the greater task of the day, to sit intimately at Jesus' feet. Christ calls us to be more like Mary and less like Martha, and Joanna Weaver dives into what that looks like.

So today, I again picked this book up randomly. I carpool with a couple coworkers to work occasionally and today was a ride to work day, so I brought the book to work knowing I'd be stuck at the office during lunch. Within 10.5 pages of Chapter 5, I was quickly put into place and exposed to some pretty profound, yet simple concepts about intimacy with the Lord. I want to share.

Weaver tells a story she heard from her pastor's wife when she lived in Oregon. It goes something like this, paraphrased. The woman is having people over for a special meal. She cooks, she cleans, and she prepares for the grand event. An hour or so before, she realizes her tummy is rumbling. To subside the hunger, the woman eats a small Snickers bar. It works to make the hunger pains stop. The guests arrive in the next hour or so, she serves the meal and everyone begins to dine and rave over the food. Well, the Snickers bar had curved the woman's appetite to the point that she could not truly enjoy the luxury of the meal. She was no longer hungry.

The quote from the book that stuck out to me followed this story. The woman in the story reflected after the event,

"The Lord spoke to me at that moment. He showed me that we often fill our lives with Spiritual Snickers bar - 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."

Wow. I had to ponder during my lunch break: How many things am I letting take the edge of my hunger for the Lord? How many things do I allow to distract me from Him?

And the hits didn't stop there. Later Weaver writes, "If you're having a little trouble feeling close to God - or even wanting to draw close - 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?"

Man... My reaction to both statements means there are definitely things out there taking away my hunger for God... otherwise I wouldn't have written these two statements in my notebook. And I wouldn't be writing about them now. But the scary part is what SHOULD come... knowing that I was convicted by these statements, I should sit, reflect, and pray, asking God "what are those things in my life?" Tough questions. "Are there activities, even good activities, I need to remove from my life to focus more on Him?" Food for thought.


I'll close with a favorite bible verse of mine that seems to apply here:
2 Corinthians 4:18 “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”