Seeing Dust

I've been off work the past two weeks, and trying to catch up on a lot of things around the house. One of my goals has been deeper cleaning than I usually do, and today I noticed something I'm not sure I'm excited about:

I am seeing dust.

Not that it isn't there all along - but as all my friends and family know, I just don't "see" it. I forget to dust (really - it's on my list because otherwise I would never think about it). I don't see cobwebs and I can pass by the TV for weeks without realizing it has this nasty layer on top of it.

But since I've been spending more time in our humble abode lately - and more time focusing on cleaning - I realized today that I could see dust on the TV that I just dusted 10 days ago. Dusting twice in 10 days - what's the world coming to? :) Now I fear that I will never stop seeing dust. Forevermore, I will recognize its slow creep over all our furniture.

This got me thinking - isn't it the same in our relationship with God? We start spending more time with Him and in His Word - abiding with Him - we recognize the dust in our lives. The sin and pettiness and nastiness seem to require more frequent cleaning than we'd realized. First Easter and Christmas are no longer enough ... then the weekly church service is insufficient. We begin to recognize that only a daily "bath" with the washing of the water of the Word will get rid of our dirty hands and feet. It becomes harder and harder to go back to living with a layer of dust.

That's also how it is with recognizing God's heart for the nations. Once He gives us a kingdom perspective, a global view, it becomes hard to stop being world Christians. We begin to notice the unreached people groups. We learn the phrase "unengaged, unreached" and are haunted by the idea that no one is reaching out to this group. We can't hear of a war without wondering about the missionaries in the area. And so it goes. Once our eyes are opened - which seems to take a miracle on the scale of making me recognize dust - we are never the same.

As long as we respond.

If we crawl back into our corner of the world, retreating to the familiar, the enemy will be more than happy to help us forget the anguished look on that picture, the painful headline on the article we read last night. Just as we can quench the Spirit's conviction of sin by not spending time in God's Word, we can quench His awakening of us to His global purpose by avoiding anything but the familiar.

Or, we can nurture that awareness by reading and studying and learning and going and sending and praying and analyzing Scripture for a missions perspective. We can see what kind of relationship we can have with Him if we fully obey the Great Commission and discover the depth of "Lo, I am with you always". We can break out of our comfort zones and experience God.

Not much of consequence will happen if I go back to forgetting to dust and failing to see cobwebs. Failure to see the world as God sees it, however, would be tragic. In fact, it would be the quickest way to waste a lifetime.