seizethesummer-020.jpgThere has definitely been a shortage of blogging for me the last two weeks. My husband is high school youth pastor at our church and right now we are gearing up for small groups, backyard BBQs, trip to Mexico and the biggest event will be summer camp the end of July. We will be putting on our own camp called Revival 07 and boy, does it take a lot of work to pull something like this off! I am head of the camp kitchen and have spent the last two weeks making endless lists and estimations, researching cooking equipment and creating menus. I feel like I’m on the Food Network show Dinner Impossible, but instead of one huge meal to cater, my team and I are providing 3 meals a day for 150 people for 7 days! It will be a blast! I’m really looking forward to that week, but the prep for it is taking time I would normally spend in the blog world…

With my summer goal, I’m closing in on the last few verses of James chapter 1. Earlier in the week I was working on verses 22-25

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

I love James’ analogy of the mirror. As I was working at memorizing these verses I thought of how sometimes when I’m out I’ll catch my reflection in a mirror or window and notice that my hair is poofing out or that I had something in my teeth. After I catch that glimpse of the problem I don’t just forget about it, I immediately work to fix it.

It would be incredible if every time we opened our Bibles we were looking for something to do once we closed it. Sometimes we can be so spiritually lazy and I wonder if it is because we think no one notices. People can only see what is going on outside of us, they don’t know our hearts, so maybe it doesn’t matter if we are doers or not. What a dangerous deception because God looks past all the surface distractions straight into our hearts. He knows in an instant if we are in His Word each day and if we really take it to heart and do it or not. When we look into God’s Word, He tells us what we need to change in our lives and we need to be careful that we don’t ignore or procrastinate on what we see in the reflection. We should never come away from God’s Word unchanged.