Just Do It!!

I woke up this morning bright and early and it was cold, just plain cold.  I put on my hoodie and my big, pink fluffy robe and stumbled to my daughter’s room to get her up for her first day back to school after Christmas vacation.  I then went to get the dog, stopping to check the thermometer.  0 degrees Fahrenheit? Maybe I didn’t read it right.  I wiped the sleep from my eyes and looked again to see 0 degrees Fahrenheit.  Is that even legal?  Now I haven’t seen these temperatures in a good long while as we’ve been in Mexico the last few winters.  In Mexico this time of year it is still about 80 degrees, so it’s pretty comfortable.  I wasn’t feeling too comfortable as I took the dog outside for her after sleeping bathroom break. 

In my mind if something is uncomfortable you want to get away from it as quickly as possible.  My dog, on the other hand, decided to sniff around and eat snow until her feet were so cold that she could barely stand.  Needless to say, she did not get the job done after several long minutes of standing outside.  A half an hour later, I had to return to what felt like Siberia so that she could do what she was supposed to do the first time. 

Do you ever find that you do the same type of thing with many situations in your own life?  Something you have to do may not be very pleasing and so you sniff around for a while, lollygag for another bit and then decide that you’re too uncomfortable to proceed. Your uncomfortableness causes you to run inside hoping to receive shelter from the situation that must be faced. For awhile it works, you go on with something else that will take your mind off the inevitable until, like my dog, you have to go back out and do what you knew should have been done the first time that you put it off. 

Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not calling you a dog.  But you have to admit, that we do play some of the same tricks don’t we?  We don’t like to be uncomfortable; who does?  Even my dog doesn’t on a cold, windy day.  Here are some things that I told my dog early this morning as I was freezing, standing outside with her.  I believe we can apply the same principles to the uncomfortable things that we have to do.

            1.  Just Do It!!   Nike sure had it right with this.  ‘Nuf said

            2.  The sooner you get done the sooner you can go lie on your stuffed pillow and chew on your bone. (To a person I’d say, the sooner you take the bull by the horns and get er done the sooner you can get on to the things you want to be doing)

            3.  You know you’re going to have to come out in a half an hour anyway to “get the job done” so put your feet down and face the snow  (to a person I’d say, you know you’re going to have to face it again sooner than later so there’s no time like the present)

            4. If you wouldn’t have spent so much time sniffing around and eating the snow your feet wouldn’t have gotten cold and you could have finished the task.  (To a person I’d say, if you didn’t try everything in your power to dodge the situation you could have just finished the task then and there)

If you really look at it, most all of the principles blend into the same sort of thing. We just have to face the task at hand. Sometimes the things we have to face can be scary, unknown, or just plain uncomfortable. But we have hope.  The Hebrew name for God,Jehovah 'Ezer , means, “Lord my Help” or “Lord our Help”.  This is great news for us as humans.  We have a helper.  God is our help.  When we have uncomfortable situations that have to be faced He is there.  We don’t have to figure it out on our own.  Hebrews 13:6 says, So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

How does bitter weather, taking my dog outside and watching her be uncomfortable bring us to the Lord being our helper?  It’s because I had a lot of time (many times) outside in the cold with the dog today being uncomfortable myself.  As I stood waiting and shielding myself from the cold,  it got me thinking of what we do when we are in uncomfortable situations.  Letting God be our helper seems like such a simple thing but oftentimes we try to figure it out on our own, going around and around in circles before we just let him help us do it.  This week instead of putting your task off, allow God to be your help and Just Do It!