Daily Coffee with God

Be on guard, keep awake. Mark 13:33

I didn’t fall all at once into drug addiction. Rather, my descent into madness was a slow one, requiring one small bad decision after another, for years. When disaster finally struck and my day of reckoning arrived, I looked around and said, “How did I get here?” At that point, I had to admit that I didn’t just take a massive wrong turn one day. No, I’d made a thousand little mistakes, and taken a thousand little steps, to get where I was. When I finally got to treatment, I realized I’d been walking towards it for years.

This is usually the way it is with our struggles. The one who wrestles with food – and is 150 pounds overweight – may suddenly develop serious health consequences, but he doesn’t get there in one day. Rather, his failure is one bite at a time for years, until his out-of-control behavior catches up with him. The fall may come suddenly, but the failure is years in the making.

In today’s passage, as Jesus spoke of the End of the Age, he warned his followers to remain alert. The day of reckoning will come. You must be prepared (my paraphrase). It may seem that we’re getting away with living however we want, but one day, we’ll answer for our behavior. Have we daily followed the path to life? Or, have we lived only for ourselves?

The little daily decisions matter. What do I first do in the morning? Do I check social media, or do I turn to God? In my disaster and desperation for a new life, I made the deal with God, that I’d get up every day and make a genuine effort to abandon my way for his. Now, daily, I get up before the sun, make my coffee, sit in my chair, and talk with God.

I need my daily coffee with God, so that my day starts out in the right direction. In following myself, I made small gradual turns away from God, so that eventually, I was going 180 degrees away from him. Now, during the day, I may get distracted and veer slightly off course, but if I reset every day, redirecting my life, I never get far off track. I may not do it perfectly, but in making a daily, genuine effort to follow God, I’ve not returned to the utter disaster of my addiction.