Cleaning up a mess

Here's a little thought and some different events happening for women at Life Stream.   First, here are some upcoming events.  Our next Chapters Book is called "Who Switched Off My Brain?"   It deals how we can handle our toxic thoughts and our thought life.  We will meet on November 29th at 7:00 p.m. at Biggby Coffee.  Also our Women of Adventure will meet in November and have a "food party".  We will be freezing meals to help out the meals ministry and also anyone that may need a meal in the community.  More information on that soon. 

Newbies is going on and is not too late to join and well as a Monday night bible study on Daniel.

Now for the thought of the day.  My daughter just had her 14th birthday.  She want's to work in interior design someday so we thought she might get a kick out designing her room for her birthday.  She shares her room with her 8 year old sister and both have their own sides of the room with even a curtain to separate their portion.  We took her to IKEA because it was a great place to deal with small spaces.  She did have fun but what we all realized when we got everything home was...you have to assemble everything together yourself and I mean everything.  Even a little box we had to assemble with screws - 12 of them to be exact.  Needless to say, she also wanted the room a different color...so we painted (which I did get out of because I had vertigo...that's what I told my husband)  So we had to clear the room.  Where did we clear their stuff?  In our room and in their brother's room and we had to assemble everything in the living room and so on.  Our whole house look like it exploded with clothes and boxes.  After we painted and put things back and organized their room, it looked awesome and the girls were very excited about their new room.

This got me thinking.  How many times do we tell ourselves that we are going to get right with God but when we start to clean up our act we find it gets hard and sometimes messy?  No one told us that because we said we wanted to get right that we didn't magically become a new person.  No one told us we might have to "assemble" our project and get rid of habits that we might not want to get rid of.

Our instruction manual - the Bible.  Our mess - bad habits.  Before assembling - sorting out what needs to stay, what needs to be thrown out and following the directions to make sure our life has a solid foundation.  After assembling - a new person filled with God's joy and striving to be the person God wants us to be.