Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Spiritual Climate Control

"Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer." - Romans 12:12 (RSV).

One of the most wonderful feelings that I can remember from my  childhood days is something that may seem quite trivial to some  people, but that has been burned into my memory. In the home I grew  up in, we did not have central air conditioning. We had ceiling fans  in most rooms, and in my  parents' room was a window-unit air  conditioner.


During the summer months when it became really hot outside, I well  remember  complaining about the temperature in the house. Many times I  remember coming inside from the heat, or waking up during a hot night  and walking into my parents' room to lie on the floor. You see, they  often kept the door to their room closed because that one air-
conditioner would burn out if it had to cool the entire house. I  still can feel that cool air blowing across my body and making the  discomfort I had felt melt completely away.


Now that I am all grown up and living on my own, I cannot imagine not  having central air conditioning in my home. The thought of relying  solely on a small air conditioner to cool my home properly would  never even cross my mind.


In our spiritual lives we can use some climate control to keep our  spiritual homes comfortable. We can use prayer conditioning.  Unfortunately, many times we seem to think a window-unit prayer  conditioner, that is, a small prayer here, a prayer of desperation
there, or a recital of the Lord's Prayer, is sufficient to sustain  the proper temperature in our lives and that things will be okay.  Right?


Wrong! Just as our homes require good central air conditioning to  maintain proper and consistent temperature balance, so too we use  constant prayer in our lives to maintain the proper climate and  balance in our lives. As today's scripture says, we must be constant
in our prayers.


Let us commit ourselves to daily prayer, and watch for the results.  If we do not have that prayer conditioning in our lives, things will  definitely get too hot for us to handle.

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