So, my mom lives in my basement. I know, I know, nice riff on a classic. Anyway, she came upstairs in the middle of the night yesterday to tell me that the basement is flooded. Now, mom can tend to exaggerate (love ya, mom!) but in this case she wasn't kidding. At least two inches of water covered the entire floor. If you ever need a quick wake-up, step in two inches of water from snow run off. It's better than coffee. I quickly decided that this was not a correctable problem at 4 am and went back to bed.
As I lay there trying to massage some warmth back into my feet, I thought about what my reaction was going to be to this setback. The ceiling in the back of the house had already collapsed this winter from the ice storm. Now the basement was trashed. How should I respond? This is new ground for me. Typically, I just react. That's sorta the point. But, up untillmy midnight swim, I was having a pretty good day. One might even suggest I was feeling spiritual. So I tool a moment to decide whether I was gonna go for "why me?" whiney baby or go with "I'm feeling pretty connected to God, so maybe I'll trust Him to work it out."
Now before I sound too good in this story, you need to know that "why me?" whiney baby is set as my default, especially if I'm tired. My typical response would be to fret like a southern belle on how we were going to make repairs. I would be wondering how this could have happened and wracking my brain to decide where and when I had screwed so badly that God needed to flood my basement in revenge. I easily would have ruined the next day and, depending on how much I was enjoying sulking, the entire week as well. For some reason, this time I decided I'd try a different tactic. This time I decided that life happened and I had an opportunity to discover something about God in the details. This is what I decided...
1. This was not a spiritual occasion - Ok, ok, I get it, everything is an opportunity to grow spiritually. What I'm saying is that my wet floor had no spiritual origins. God, in His divine sovreignty, did not give me a scale model of the great deluge. He was not punishing me for anything. Frankly, He has demonstrated creativity and if He wanted to get me, He would have gone after my comic books. He was not trying to teach me any lessons, other than, maybe, that when rain pours onto a foot of snow, the water finds hidden ways into the basement. This was just life. You take the good, you take the bad, and there you have it.
2. I choose my reaction - I need to stop allowing situations to dictate my response. I get to choose. If I choose to be upset, I can't complain when I feel miserable.
3. Finding God in the flood - Here's what I discovered when I chose not to complain but to trust: the flood was still there. When I went back down in the morning, the problem hadn't changed. And I wasn't thrilled that we had a mess on our hands. I wasn't all like "praise Jesus for this opportunity!" But as the day went on, I realized that I could sense His peace in my heart and His Spirit in my house. The problem didn't go away but neither did He. It's not so hard dealing with issues when you realize that Jesus is right there along side of you as you take them on. Somehow they lose their vitality in His presence. So now, I wasn't praising Jesus for the flood. I was praising Him that He is willing to live in a house with a soggy basement. So maybe it was a spiritual thing after all.
So that was the start to my week. Hopefully, yours is going much better. But if not, if the storms of life are flooding where you live, I'd encourage you to react with the knowledge that Jesus if right there with you if you want Him. And that makes taking them on so much easier!
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