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lessons from my pool... pt 3

Back to the pool I go.  This will probably be my last although there is so much more I have learned from it, I guess I do not want to beat a dead horse.  What do you think of when you think of a pool?  Most people think of a refreshing, relaxing experience.  Maybe you think of the chlorine smell and the cool water over your body or maybe floating on a float and relaxing in the sun.  Usually though it is some sort of refreshment.  Even swimmers that compete feel refreshed after getting out of a pool to do their workout. 

What did I think of when seeing my pool?  I thought, I am going to have to scrub down after going in there.  The whole time I am in there, I am going to have to be cleaning out bugs.  Granted, this is a little pool and the filter isn’t working very well, but those are my thoughts when I think of our little 10 foot round pool. 

For a while, I was struggling with my devotions.  I didn’t want to do them because I knew that my life was needing maintenance and I didn’t feel like going through the maintenance and working on the areas in my life that needed it.  I wasn’t wanting to take the junk out of my life because it was too much work, so I just ignored it.  Well as you ignore the mess that is accumulating, all it is doing is just building up and building up and building up and making it harder to get back to the life you had before. 

It wasn’t refreshing for me to go to the Bible again because I knew that I had to work on areas that I didn’t want to work on.  I knew that I needed to let God work on my quite a bit in my life, but I didn’t want to, it was too hard- so instead of being refreshed and working on having something refreshing to look forward to, I was getting more panicked about it.  I was looking at it not with disgust, but with a “stay away from there” attitude.  I just stayed away from it- easier to just avoid it than to try to go swimming in muck filled waters and try to clean it all up. 

What is great though is that we have a helper- we have a pool maintenance man that will come in and do all the hard work for us.  HOW I WISH I HAD THAT FOR MY REAL POOL!  The pool maintenance man will help us clean up everything – it wont necessarily be easy, or fast, but God will come in and start cleaning up all the junk in our life- he will scrape away at the built up muck until we have sparkling waters again.  We just have to let him. 

I can’t sit there and just say, “it is clean enough, but I wouldn’t go in it”, I need to let God work though everything and work on cleaning up and work with Him to maintain my life so that I don’t become nasty, stagnant water, filled with bad gross things that I wouldn’t want to be part of at all. 

1 Timothy 1:5
“The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”


With that said… 

Philippians 1:9-10
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ…”

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