Reading the Details (Assembling the school desks)

The new school desks.

Proverbs 4:13 (NLT)Take hold of my instructions; don’t let them go. Guard them, for they are the key to life.


A few weeks ago I was assigned the task of assembling our new school desks for our home school room.  My wife started homeschooling our 2 girls last year, but we thought it was time to step up our game a little and make our back porch look more "school looking"

My wife had 2 identical desks shipped in from Amazon, and then it was my job to assemble them.  I take pride in being able to put things together..I mean how hard could this really be...

I opened the box, took out all the parts, and even looked at the assembly manual ( Yes, I am not too prideful to look at instructions :) These instructions even had pretty decent pictures, so I thought I was good to go.  I went ahead and started assembling the first desk, and it was going great..I was knocking this out of the park..or so I thought.  I soon found out that even though I thought I was doing what I thought the instructions said, I had the top of the desk flipped on the wrong side so the the holes of the shelves did not match up to where they should have been.  There was no way to quickly fix this, than to undo about 20 minutes of work and then redo it.  I went ahead and started taking the desk apart and then started to build it back up again.  I finally got almost to the end and then found another mistake I had made, and had to spend another 10 minutes fixing that mistake.  Finally the desk was assembled after over an hour's worth of work and much wasted time and added frustration.

Learning from my previous mistakes, I was able to unbox and assemble the second desk without making the previous mistakes I made the first time.  It was a total breeze now that I knew what the instructions really said and was able to put them into action.

Now that the 2 desks are put together, you would have never known how different they were during the assembly process.  They look the same after all..

We can see the Word of God, and we can even read the word of God, but sometimes we are not reading enough into the details and pondering his Word and that is when our lives can get thrown off course.  We may be going through life and saying to ourselves "Wow, this looks like a great decision!"  Only to find out later that it was not exactly what God wanted us to do.  Then we have humbly let God break us down, turn us around and build us back up the way he wants to.

How much better would our lives go if we treated it like the second desk.  A life where we read his details and put it into practice.  God could get us to go where he wants to without having to rebuild and repair us all the time.  God is a good father, so he will get you to where he wants you, if you let him do so.  How much pain, time and frustration would it save if we let him guide our lives by following what his principles say instead of "skimming through his Word" and kinda doing what looks good to us and thinking  " God will be OK with this..right?"

I want to encourage you today to really seek out what God is saying to you in your life and pay close attention to the details!


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