“Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” Proverbs 3:3
My hands and arms were full of stuff as I approached my truck. Having mentally run down the list of places to go, people to see and things to do, I was confident I had it all. I fired up the truck and started backing out the driveway when out of nowhere a mental ‘zing’ ripped through my head…”phone!” Looking at the ‘stuff’ on my seat, it wasn’t there. I reversed the process.
STOP the truck, remove the keys, walk to the house, unlock the door… search. The phone wasn’t in the house@#^! Walking back to the truck, I discovered it had fallen down in between the seat and the center console, laying almost unseen! RE-starting my truck, I went on with the morning… until!
I had made a list of things that needed done this week. One of them involved a special request to fix the whiteboard in my wife’s Sunday School room. Her room is ALSO the place where the printer was. Needing to make copies for church, the very first thing I saw when I entered the room… was the whiteboard! Then it hit me…. I had forgotten the tools I needed to fix it!!!
Initially I was upset with myself. I started to blame it on getting older… then being too busy. But BOTH of those are simply EXCUSES. I had been asked by my wife to do something for her. So I took a breath… FORGOT about the circumstances, or finding something or someone else to blame… and remembered her request. What was Jesus asking me to do in love and faithfulness? I immediately left, went home, got the tools, returned and ‘got-r-dun!’
In this world failure, forgetfulness, fatigue and frustration lead to LOTS of dead ends. Places that force me to stop, think and reprocess what I am doing, where I am going and WHY! In this case, I HAD it in my memory, then forgot, I HAD written it down, but didn’t read my own notes! But thankfully, no one had died and no catastrophe happened because of my humanness. THIS time!
Proverbs 3 is a very good chapter as it gives a LOT of good advice to those who choose to follow God. This verse is NOT about telling us how to take better notes to get more things done. It IS about starting out with the correct attitude, dealing with the ‘WHY’ I do what I do… or don’t! It is literally cause and effect.
If I live my life with Love and Faithfulness toward God as my FIRST priority, this chapter lists the blessings that come with such a life! Excuses and blame are useless when my heart is wrong. They are completely unnecessary when my heart is right! “Heart… take a memo…”
