Showered Clean

I woke up with a bad attitude. This is in part to going to bed with bad feelings present in my heart, and partly to being woken up by arguing kids. Three grade school aged kids arguing at 6:15 in the morning is not the preferred alarm, let me tell you. Waking up with a bad attitude, often if unchecked leads to a bad day for me and the others around me. It can be contagious much like a cold or the flu. It just isn’t very pleasant.

Matthew 7: 12

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for t his is the Law and the Prophets.

Finding the right~hearted attitude is sometimes challenging. I know that I can not rely on the those around me to keep me cheered up, thinking straight and with love and charity towards others. It isn’t their job. Definitely I work to keep people around me that will hold me accountable for my decisions, actions, and attitudes. But it isn’t the job of any one else to keep me on the right attitudinal track.

When I find myself spiritually funky, like I do this morning, I know that I can have a do-over. If fact, a do over can happen at anytime of the day, and as many times as needed.  If I find that my funkiness coincides with shower time, I take my prayer and meditations with me into get clean.  As I climb into the hot spray, I imagine God washing away my dirty, nasty, funky, ugly attitude. It is a great visual exercise that really does help.

As I work my way through my daily prayers, I ask God to please wash clean my attitude.  I can usually feel the effects immediately, kneeling in obedience and contrition before the Lord, even in the shower. Things of this world will tick us off, hurt our feelings, knock us off track and ruin our attitude in a heartbeat. Just as quickly praying to Our Father, will turn us around, start us over, bring us peace, renew our spirit and shower us clean.

Some days I have to do this multiple times, hourly if not every few minutes. True. That.

Going before the Lord, and giving Him my heart in prayer in the name of Jesus, should be the very breath of me. In my stubborn humanity, I forget. In my need to control things I try to keep things to myself thinking that I can figure “it” out. It is often when I am clutching to my own problems that I find my attitude slipping down into the ugly.

Romans 8: 1-2

So now those who belong to Christ Jesus will not be judged

The Spirit gives life in Christ Jesus. And the law of the Spirit has set me free from the law of wrong things, and the law of death.

Last night as I was frustrated with my own shortcomings, and feeling poorly about a situation that I knew better than to involve myself in…a Love who is a fledgling in the love of Christ said to me “First on your list should be prayer, I have already been praying for you.” OH SNAP. That hit home in a big way, and opened my heart to this Love even further. God is Good, oh so Good. How can I forget this? But I do.

James 1:17

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

Freshly Showered,

Christy