Someone is coming!

Whilst I love my dog, she is very hairy; and so I have to accept that, most of the time, my carpets have a white coating of fur. However, there are those moments when someone is coming to visit and I have an acute sense of guilt that I haven’t found the time to vacuum and dust and that any visitors are going to leave with more hair than they arrived with! When I have warning, I do ‘panic housework’ to at least make the place presentable, so that, for most people, it is quite safe to visit. I find myself apologising for the untidiness believing that it probably isn’t up to ‘their’ standard.

When I visit other people I am very aware of how lovely their homes are and wishing that I could just wave a magic wand and I would have the perfect home with everything in its place; well, ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would ride’. I feel better when I visit someone who has a more untidy house than mine and obviously has the same issues with housework, and I realise that it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t really worry about it anymore as I was told quite emphatically that, ‘I have come to visit you not your house’. That’s a good thought to hold on to when it all gets too much and I hope that all my visitors think the same way. I did have to do some ‘panic housework’ this week when there was a meeting at the manse so that I didn’t have to brush everyone down as they left.

There are always those unexpected visitors who have to take ‘pot luck’ and ‘take me as they find me’ and we can’t always prepare for them…..or can we?

For 2000 years we have been waiting for the second coming of Jesus and we have to wonder whether or not we are ever going to be prepared to receive Him. We won’t have any warning of when it will happen so we have to be ready all of the time, but we do have warning that it WILL happen and we must be prepared.

God wants us to focus on the real issues of our hearts – it doesn’t matter what we have or what we look like – what truly matters is whether or not we have prepared our hearts to receive Jesus. He knows everything about us and there is no point in trying to pretend.

What people see when they come to my home is the ‘cleaned up bits’ when, in reality there is probably washing up in the sink and papers all over my study desk and an unmade bed.

God is not interested in the bits that we clean up for the sake of appearances; he wants us to be cleaned up inside, the places that other people don’t see.  That is something that can’t happen in a panic, it is the regular pattern of being in a good relationship with Him that will make the difference and it won’t matter when He comes again, we will be ready.

So, It is my day off……and I am doing the housework!

Every blessing